Month: October 2008

Some months ago I was at Ashburnham Place for a long weekend with members of my church. It was a time of fellowship and relaxation with family and friends, interspersed with sessions of learning and contemplation.

During the breaks, I took the opportunity to wander around and observe how real care and attention had been given to the design of everyday things there. Take the shutters here as an example, shown in the closed position:

What shutters? I hear you ask. And that’s my precise point. Now look at this photograph, with the shutter in the open position:

I thought it was a great exposition of good design, covering the three things that really matter to me in such contexts: functionally valuable, aesthetically pleasing and able to stand the test of time. Isn’t that what good design is?

Here are a couple more examples of similar shutters elsewhere at Ashburnham, again showing the closed and open positions:

While I was wandering around the grounds, I was very taken with this view:

An amazing vista, conceived by someone who was unlikely to be alive at the time his/her conception reached maturity. An example of true delayed gratification, someone who genuinely designed something for usage and enjoyment by generations to follow. There is something breathtaking about it I just can’t put into words, something that is quintessentially about good design.

During one of the breaks, I had the opportunity to go to Bodiam Castle. People knew how to protect homes in those days. Especially homes built by the ill-gotten gains of marauding into other peoples’ homes! And done before the invention of uncivilised, unsightly, un-everything barbed wire.

Talking about barbed wire, I noticed this when I was last at the new Ribbit offices off Castro in Mountain View:

Notice the studs? Subtle enough, not particularly unsightly or disfiguring, and apparently for one purpose only: to prevent skateboarders “grinding” on the raised edges. You may argue that if one has to have such things, it is better to have them tastefully implemented. But I would rather they weren’t there in the first place. It’s like designing a tasteful implementation of DRM. The very idea is absurd.

I couldn’t help but smile at this story in the Telegraph, worthy of Donald E Westlake’s Dortmunder series at its best:

Officers attending the robbery on Tuesday of an armoured car in Monroe, in Washington state, discovered that the suspect’s description was far from unusual among people outside the Bank of America branch that morning. In all, around a dozen men were wearing long-sleeved blue shirts, surgical masks and blue hats.

They had been lured to the scene by a bogus advert on the Craigslist website that had offered road maintenance jobs. It specified that applicants should wear blue shirts and dust masks.

The robber shot pepper spray into the face of a guard outside the bank before fleeing with a money bag across a nearby creek.

Witnesses said he jumped into the water and floated away on a tire inner tube.

Now that’s style.

Curators are of necessity fastidious people, charged with leading the acquisition and care of objects related to a particular field of study or collection.

In the past these objects were physical in nature, real and tangible. Some of the “objects” curated were living things: zoos had curators. [An aside: My father used to tell me a story about the curator of the Alipore Zoo and his dalliance with a mongoose (or two). He wanted a pair of the creatures in question to be sent to him by the curator of the Sydney Zoo, or so the story went. But he had a problem. He didn’t know the plural of mongoose. He tried “mongooses”. It didn’t feel right. Tried “mongeese”. It felt even wronger. Went back to “mongooses”. It still didn’t feel right enough. So, finally, he wrote “Dear Curator: Could you please send me a mongoose? Yours faithfully, Curator, Alipore Zoo. PS While you’re at it, could you please send me a second mongoose?.]

I digress. Curators. Fastidious professionals. Finding, collecting and taking care of objects, both animate as well as inanimate.

And now digital as well. Yes, digital. For some time now I’ve been hearing about the need for digital curation, the need to identify people who will select, acquire and look after digital objects for future generations.

I can understand the need for digital curators, people with the passion, the vocation, the time and the skills to weed through the noise and the garbage and collect and preserve that which is valuable.

More recently, I’ve had to consider the need for digital news curators, as more and more events of this type take place: Who’s to blame for spreading phony Jobs story?

I thought CNET did a good job of making sure the blame is not simply shifted to “citizen journalism” per se, a trend that Chris Brogan also comments about in Citizen Journalists Aren’t Evil.

Journalism 101 is about checking facts before reporting. In this respect there is no difference between “mainstream” journalism and “citizen” journalism, there is a duty of care across the profession as a whole. People who pass unsubstantiated rumours around are bad journalists, regardless of the medium they choose to use. And regardless of who pays their salaries.

The way we gather news is changing. Or is it? What is the difference between a freelance stringer and a “citizen journalist”? Both are self-employed. Both have some links with the places where they get published.

And both have reputations that are tied to the veracity of their reports. Reputations that determine whether they get published or not.

In the past, this reputation was decided upon by a small group of people at the centre of a publishing machine, it determined who got published and who didn’t, and everyone else was none the wiser. Now, with the continued democratisation of news publishing, barriers to entry are getting lower and lower.

There is one more, crucial, change. Reputation is now determined by democracy and not oligarchy.

But maybe all this doesn’t matter anyway. The veracity of a newspaper only matters if people read it. According to this report, it would appear that at least one participant in the presidential election does not have that problem. Heaven forfend.

Flarf: (taken from Wikipedia): Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant garde poetry movement of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Its first practitioners practiced an aesthetic dedicated to the exploration of “the inappropriate” in all of its guises. Their method was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts.

Flarf. Not something you come across every day. I like reading poetry, and I’d been aware of the term for maybe four or five years. Like Large Hadron Colliders, it was something I had heard of, knew something about, and that was that. Nothing more.

Until a few days ago, when I found myself part of something Coming Soon On Forgodot.com. Tried to figure it out, and couldn’t. On the face of it there wasn’t much there to be confused about. Issue 1 was going to feature new poems by a group of poets, a fairly large group of poets, and I was one of the poets named.

Which was great. Except for one thing. I hadn’t actually submitted any poems to the authors/editors. I do write poetry, but I’ve been keeping the poems to myself for some time. For quite some time. For a very long time. The last time I published any poetry, there was still a Shah in Iran.

I downloaded the pdf, started reading through it, soon realised that it was something other than a collection of poems, and gave up reading. I didn’t even get to see what it was that had been attributed to me; I couldn’t be bothered to go through hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages, just for that piece of information.

Ron Silliman, whom I read reasonably often,  puts it like this: ….the quirkiest thing about Issue 1 is going to be that, if it includes your name – and, hey, it probably does – you have no memory of having written that text, nor of submitting it to Issue 1….

Ron suggests that the list is “as complete a collection of mostly post-avant poets [he has] ever seen”.

I think it’s simpler than that. I think the common element between all the names in Issue 1 is Ron Silliman. I think that every person can be directly linked to Ron, via his blog, via his blogroll or via the comments people made on his blog. I was curious as to how my name came to be included in the issue, and that’s the best I could come up with. It just so happens that many of the post-avant poets tend to read Ron Silliman.

So anyway.

How do I feel about being included in an anthology of poetry that is unusual to say the least, containing a very large number of poems that look like they’ve been written by one or two people at most, and having words attributed to me that I did not say or write?

I had a whole bunch of reactions, which surprised me. Here they are, for what they’re worth:

• Installation art: A part of me, a relaxed, laid-back part of me, felt that it was like finding out that someone had created an installation art exhibit out of local telephone directories, and my name was visible amongst thousands of others.
• Trolling: A slightly more uptight part of me felt that the project felt a bit like trolling, and I wasn’t happy with that. I don’t like trolls. But I couldn’t stay uptight. The truth is that I couldn’t really convince myself that Issue 1 was the work of evil trolls.
• Professional poetical pride: A very small part of me wanted to see the particular bit of doggerel associated with my name, but I found I was too lazy to do that. I’ve been misquoted so often in the press that it really doesn’t matter to me….except for one thing…. if my name was somehow associated with something violently against my beliefs, something truly repugnant to me. Then I would be upset. Then I would do something about it. On the face of it, having riffled through the first few pages, I think this risk is negligible.

As you can tell, I was largely relaxed about it, but that may well be because I’m not a practising publishing poet. At least not right now.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the project, the guys have made me think. And learn. Having known what “flarf” was, I now know what “anarcho-flarf” is.

Views?

I wasn’t in a position to keep up with the news last night; I was too busy looking up at a canopy of stars, talking to friends and colleagues, experiencing what it feels like to be homeless for one night. Great experience, especially when you can choose where and when, especially when it’s only once a year.

As luck would have it, yesterday turned out to be one of the coldest nights of the year, around 40 degrees Fahrenheit; this, on the banks of the Thames, with a gentle wind reducing the effective temperature even further. As I looked around, I watched people try and fashion makeshift windbreaks out of umbrellas and polythene sheets; struggling to cocoon themselves in sleeping bags with hands that had become stumps and eyes that wouldn’t stop watering; walking around trying to convince themselves that it would make them feel warmer. [An aside: the stump-like hands and frozen fingers meant that there weren’t many BlackBerries or iPhones in evidence.]

Sounds hard. Not really.

It was all too easy. After all, we had spent all day in warm offices with warm colleagues and warm bank balances. We were in reverse Cinderella time, the clock would strike and everything would go back to normal. We’d all had a decent meal for dinner, and we were all in anticipation of a decent breakfast.

The morning came and I could go home. Go home to a warm family and a warm shower and a warm bed. [I have never enjoyed a shower as much as I did this morning, allowing stinging needles of super-hot water to drive away every memory of the previous night’s cold.]

Byte Night is not about one night, it’s about the lives of children and youth that need help. Children and youth who don’t have the warm choices we have. Children and youth forced to leave home without warning, forced to sleep in doorways and abandoned cars and nooks and crannies.

Byte Night turned 10 yesterday, a decade during which around £2m has been raised. Amazing stuff, great testimony to the vision and hard work done of people like Ken Deeks and James Bennet, and a great reward for the incredible work done by the people in Action for Children. We raised a lot of money over the last few days. But we can raise more, so I’m going to keep the site open for a few more days. Link here. If you’re feeling warm when you read this, think about the people who aren’t. Enough said.