Wednesday, May 28, 2008
High speed junk
Being an academic by profession enabled me to be in at the beginning of the computer revolution. At home I ensured we had everything from ZX Spectrums and Amstrads on. My MA dissertation was typed on a golf ball and my PhD thesis was word processed. In the former, when I inadvertently put down the wrong letter or the wrong word, I pondered awhile and tried to form a new word or sentence to encompass the mistake I had in front of me. A game of micro-consequences, if you like. Anything to avoid Tippex. It forced me into creative language. Occasionally it even sent me on a new path of thought. But above all, writing then involved keeping everything in your head in an order that could be relayed in sequence to the typewriter keys. Nowadays, writing is hewn from blocks. There is no need to sift, shape and deliver in the head. Just throw down the words and then sculpt and refine them out there, in front of you – or, worse, have an automatic editor do it for you.
Alongside this, everything has speeded up. With spell checks, letter and line manipulation, formatting and so on, together with the capacity to use an instant thesaurus and web searching for information on any word, term or subject, writing ceases to be internally gestated and aesthetically pre-formed but interacts with the undigested text-landscape outside it. Umberto Eco said that people now wrote in paragraphs where once they wrote in sentences. They also write like unconscious pack animals, unaware how their texts are conditioned by everything around them.
Does this capacity for speed bring any benefits? Probably not. It outstrips the minds of most and encourages them to think that the fireworks-effect of depositing words on screen or on paper via a printer equates with a meaningful contribution to knowledge. Making it possible for everyone to be an author does not translate into a widespread increase in worthwhile literature. Journalists must write to meet the demands of voracious production deadlines and it shows. Sound bytes and word bytes are thought-lite. News is thrown together and uploaded on to screens in the lemming rush to be first and the consequences are there for all to see, with innocent people branded, events misconstrued, innuendo recorded as fact, moral panic raised and cynicism spread.
It would be a good move for civilised writing to have USB memory pens. Your computer would not be able to word-process what had not been handwritten and recorded first, before you uploaded your draft.
Then again we could all go back to lead pencils and erasers.
Being an academic by profession enabled me to be in at the beginning of the computer revolution. At home I ensured we had everything from ZX Spectrums and Amstrads on. My MA dissertation was typed on a golf ball and my PhD thesis was word processed. In the former, when I inadvertently put down the wrong letter or the wrong word, I pondered awhile and tried to form a new word or sentence to encompass the mistake I had in front of me. A game of micro-consequences, if you like. Anything to avoid Tippex. It forced me into creative language. Occasionally it even sent me on a new path of thought. But above all, writing then involved keeping everything in your head in an order that could be relayed in sequence to the typewriter keys. Nowadays, writing is hewn from blocks. There is no need to sift, shape and deliver in the head. Just throw down the words and then sculpt and refine them out there, in front of you – or, worse, have an automatic editor do it for you.
Alongside this, everything has speeded up. With spell checks, letter and line manipulation, formatting and so on, together with the capacity to use an instant thesaurus and web searching for information on any word, term or subject, writing ceases to be internally gestated and aesthetically pre-formed but interacts with the undigested text-landscape outside it. Umberto Eco said that people now wrote in paragraphs where once they wrote in sentences. They also write like unconscious pack animals, unaware how their texts are conditioned by everything around them.
Does this capacity for speed bring any benefits? Probably not. It outstrips the minds of most and encourages them to think that the fireworks-effect of depositing words on screen or on paper via a printer equates with a meaningful contribution to knowledge. Making it possible for everyone to be an author does not translate into a widespread increase in worthwhile literature. Journalists must write to meet the demands of voracious production deadlines and it shows. Sound bytes and word bytes are thought-lite. News is thrown together and uploaded on to screens in the lemming rush to be first and the consequences are there for all to see, with innocent people branded, events misconstrued, innuendo recorded as fact, moral panic raised and cynicism spread.
It would be a good move for civilised writing to have USB memory pens. Your computer would not be able to word-process what had not been handwritten and recorded first, before you uploaded your draft.
Then again we could all go back to lead pencils and erasers.
Labels: Technology. Writing. Knowledge.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Eating time….
We have all some knowledge of our biological clocks – not the ones that tell us our libidos are under threat – the others, the ones that tell us to go to sleep. When we are jetlagged it is because we have contravened a basic regulatory mechanism in our cells. Our eyes don’t like light when it should be dark, our ears want to close up their trumpets and knock off from the all day concert, our limbs want lassitude and the last thing our noses want is the smell of unwashed companions as we are landing at a far away airport. Long flights to Japan, apparently, take a week or so for the body to adjust.
Thus, time takes us prisoner.
But research on mice (aren’t mice lucky to discover practically everything first!) has shown that this time-clock is not the only clock we have. There is a master clock whose tick is so deep we are unaware of it. It is our eating clock. If we begin to starve, its beat becomes all-pervading and drives away tiredness until we have scavenged or trapped or stolen something to stave off the pangs.
Before you think, “Ah, get that cotton ball, waterlogged leather and green sponge parody of food, that is served up in a polystyrene tray, down you,” stop and consider what these mice have to tell us. Go hungry! Refuse the Trojan gift. Wait, as the cabin fills with the siren-smells of the food trolleys, and buckle yourself like Odysseus to your seat and refuse it all. Now, with stomach rumbling and the eating clock firmly to the fore, you land in Tokyo and head off to the nearest sushi bar. Before you can say ‘gochisōsama’ in thanks as the last nipped rice particle leaves its chopstick for your mouth, you will be acclimatised.
You have eaten time.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Who are you, who who, who, who...?
The Embryology Bill is to be placed before the House of Commons this week. It is full of the most intractable issues but the one I’d like to ponder on here is the use of animal and human mixed gene experimentation. Being somewhat older in the tooth (but feeling every day younger in the brain), my mind becomes a surrealist's delight of juxtaposed images culled from all my years of swimming in the black lagoon of culture as I think of this. Looking back there was Beauty and the Beast, the American import horror comics that I bought from my basin-cutting barber in his garden shed in County Durham, bug-eyed monsters in science fantasy magazines, films that preceded and then included the Alien trilogy, Mary Shelley, Franz Kafka and, more recently, the whole zombie-plague genre. (As a footnote to the last, I have, here in the womb of the Pyrenees, a satellite dish which brings in about a hundred free channels and there is a strange one called Open Access which is an unheralded and bizarre mix of poker, God and 1930s and 1940s long-forgotten films. Recently I was mesmerised by one called The Last Man on Earth, which was so badly acted you’d have thought the neighbours had wandered in for a game of charades but the plot prefigured George Romero, Danny Boyle, Cronenberg et al’s later oeuvres, in a remarkably satisfying way. It appealed both to my sense of myth and, at the same time, the sci fi nerd in me!). Meanwhile, leaving behind that digression, the Embryology Bill, I think, suggests that by terminating the mutations at 14 days, enough time will be allowed for scientists to test genetic fusions that may cure some of our worst and most heart-rending diseases.
Probably, like most people other than fundamentalists who believe God created everything, except our free will to play God (oops, another digression – I was amazed to read that the Pope’s Outer Space Spokesman is gestating the idea that God created aliens, too) I am somewhat distanced from any sense of emotion in this part of the embryology debate. We seem to be at a time in our evolution, as I have discussed before, where the species is beginning to refashion itself to meet the exigencies and calamities it and the universe have in store for it. Just as wheat is being genetically modified to handle the worst droughts or diseases, so the human species is modifying itself to handle the worst scenarios that face it, internally and externally, both on our current planet or in readiness for those to which we may have to migrate. One can see that a composite life form, a ‘Terrabeing’ may eventually emerge which is an offspring of everything that lives and breathes in the world today. And it is this extraordinary hybrid mutant that will colonise the near universe.
Imagine a world where there can be no racism, no sexism, no fundamentalism – in fact no isms or consequent wars - because we have all metamorphosed into Oneness!
The One will have inherited the earth!
Labels: Embryology, mutations, science, science fiction
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Still gathering no moss in their sixties
Of course those of us of a certain age have grown up with the Stones. We decided (or didn’t) that they represented our sexual drive in a way that the more melodic and less edgy Beatles never could. Their lyrics were more dangerous. They lived as our alter egos. Jagger’s fey athleticism appealed to boys and girls alike, The music seemed created precisely to draw from him that uninhibited, unashamed and dangerous sexuality. And the group personified wickedness on stage. I remember “Would you allow your daughters to marry one of these” being spread across the two inside pages of one right wing newspaper, with four long-haired grimacing faces staring out. The fact that they were middle class, intelligent and articulate passed us by. We, who couldn’t inhabit the seedier world of groupies, wild women and drugs, watched and fantasised. But we could dance. We could prance and pout at our girlfriends, scream out the punch lines, liberate our libidos to a series of great rocking anthems.
Martin Scorsese has a CV with rockumentaries. The Last Waltz is an exquisite rendering of The Band’s work, the Dylan four hour biography is so wonderful that it acts as a contrapuntal diary to our own lives over the same period. And now this single concert in “Shine a Light”.
Some of the reviews were scathing in a nasty, sexist and revealing way. They found these ‘old men’ in their sixties, still getting it on, horrific. Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times, particularly so. Being film reviewers they felt they could revere Scorsese’s film making while rubbishing the ageing subject matter.
If the Stones had been black Chicago musicians, there would have been none of it. (I saw so many wonderful R&B legends at Ronnie Scott’s in the sixties and they certainly did get it on to both reverential and hardly sexually repressed reactions.) No, jazz and blues men can do what they like and it’s art. But rock and roll…? Give us a break.
In fact, the Stones (despite the sickly horror of being presented to Bill Clinton, Hillary and a horde of gruesome hangers on in so-not-rock-and-roll haircuts and suits, were tight, professional, awe-inspiringly athletic and phenomenal value for money. At the same time, Scorsese’s cameras caught loving camaraderie in the shape of smiles, grins of delight, facial caresses, kisses and strokes. Jagger ruled with hard-headed control, as though these were his family of errant boys, yet at the same time, still managing to cavort his way through numbers, adding a girlish, deliberately un-coordinated St Vitus dance to his routine. Keith Richard is still the epitome of the enfant terrible who has survived the extremes into yet another piratical decade. Ronnie Wood is still the stranger at the feast. And dear old Charlie Watts. What can you say? Hair untinted, face as solemn as ever (except for one delicious knowing moment when he pretends it’s all too much, whacking skins at his age), you’d still love him to pop round for supper.
For all the ‘they’ve sold out’ stories, the boys can still do the business and they are so mega rich they could have copped out years ago but like all who have touched the stars in whatever they do, they drive themselves on because they love it, love each other and love whipping up a storm.
Labels: Shine a lIght, The Rolling Stones. Ageism. Rock and Roll
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
The Sweet Tooth Fairies
When I received my PhD all those years ago, all the new doctorates in the country were revealed in some academic journal, I can’t remember which. Anyway, it was engrossing to discover what parallel brains had been working on during the four years I had slaved (with, I admit, mixed results). I have long felt that there are only two areas of genuine freedom in education for the student. These are the nursery classroom and doctoral study. In the first there is space and time to play with physical matter and in the second to play with grey matter. A key ingredient of a PhD should be originality and for the tiny child, almost everything seems original. Anyway, the title that eventually caught my eye in the not very long list of theses’ titles, was ‘Slippage in Meringues’. I’m not sure how long the author struggled with the central complexity of the meringue and I never requested a micro-fiche copy from the British Library but it was a lesson that in this life people pursue the most idiosyncratic of intellectual quarries.
A recent New Scientist issue contains a story about women’s voices. Apparently they shift in some previously unknown scale as the woman progresses through the menstrual cycle. When they are at their most fertile the timbre becomes liminal, bridging the gap between them and men:
…scientists have suggested that very subtle changes caused by the rise and fall of different sex hormones can be detected by men, who then perhaps find a woman more attractive without necessarily even realising why.
One can imagine the laboratory with rows of speakers whispering huskily their siren-like recordings, drawing ignorant males from all over the research campus to stand, in chest-puffed queues, scratching their heads outside the code-locked doors and not having the faintest clue what has brought them there.
In this respect there is a lot in common between meringues and men. Gooey centres.
When I received my PhD all those years ago, all the new doctorates in the country were revealed in some academic journal, I can’t remember which. Anyway, it was engrossing to discover what parallel brains had been working on during the four years I had slaved (with, I admit, mixed results). I have long felt that there are only two areas of genuine freedom in education for the student. These are the nursery classroom and doctoral study. In the first there is space and time to play with physical matter and in the second to play with grey matter. A key ingredient of a PhD should be originality and for the tiny child, almost everything seems original. Anyway, the title that eventually caught my eye in the not very long list of theses’ titles, was ‘Slippage in Meringues’. I’m not sure how long the author struggled with the central complexity of the meringue and I never requested a micro-fiche copy from the British Library but it was a lesson that in this life people pursue the most idiosyncratic of intellectual quarries.
A recent New Scientist issue contains a story about women’s voices. Apparently they shift in some previously unknown scale as the woman progresses through the menstrual cycle. When they are at their most fertile the timbre becomes liminal, bridging the gap between them and men:
…scientists have suggested that very subtle changes caused by the rise and fall of different sex hormones can be detected by men, who then perhaps find a woman more attractive without necessarily even realising why.
One can imagine the laboratory with rows of speakers whispering huskily their siren-like recordings, drawing ignorant males from all over the research campus to stand, in chest-puffed queues, scratching their heads outside the code-locked doors and not having the faintest clue what has brought them there.
In this respect there is a lot in common between meringues and men. Gooey centres.