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Harper Lee on the Modern World

In The Times, Ben MacIntyre quotes Harper Lee, in one of her very few public utterances since 1964:

Today, aged 84, the author of one of the bestselling novels of the last century lives as she has always lived, with her older sister, in Monroeville, surrounded by books. In one of the very few quotable things she has said in the past 40 years, she remarked: “In an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.”

I am tired of this lazy shortcut, which equates using technology with stupidity of having an ’empty mind’.  Clay Shirky’s essay on ‘Cognitive Surplus’ (which I believe is the topic of an entire book to be published next week) dismantles this idea.  What do Lee and the other smug detractors of the Internet think we are doing with all this technology?  We are consuming ideas.  We are thinking, collectively more deeper and with more eclecticism than ever before.  Such technology liberates us from the (admittedly) homogenizing forces of mass media, and instead allows us to seek out a greater spread of ideas, art forms and entertainment.  When people sneer at this,I think it is just a form of elitism: The “laptops, cellphones and iPods” allow anyone access to the world’s information, not just those who can afford the money and space to store tons of bound paper on shelves (aesthetically pleasing though that is…).
See also: Kafka would have had a twitter feed…

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Fallout

As flights resume following the Eyjafjallajokull erruption, Europe is left counting the economic cost of a genuine, real-life, bona fide Act of God.  I was at the London Book Fair this week, with English PEN, and saw first hand the effect that cancelled travel plans can have on commerce, and indeed, the free flow of ideas.  Below is my Flickr photoset ‘Fallout’, showing the forlorn empty trade stands at the fair.

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Blog Burning

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post – ‘Write A Blog, Kill Your Career‘, about the possibility of bloggers going into politics and the trouble that their archives might cause them.  I linked to a marvellous cartoon by XKCD, Fuck That Shit, which summed up my attitude to the worry of self-censorship.
This week, that piece is looking prescient.  On Monday, Ellie Gellard, the activist/tweeter/blogger who launched Labour’s Election Manifesto, was ‘exposed‘ as having called for Gordon Brown’s resignation… two years ago.  Then on Wednesday, Chris Mounsey a.k.a. Devil’s Kitchen came a cropper on The Politics Show, flummoxed when some of his more colourful language was thrown back at him by Andrew Neil.  Mark Thompson has a good analysis:

I had hoped for a spirited and libertarian defence of his right to have an on-line persona that is close to the knuckle and still be involved in active politics.

Indeed.  It is actually quite disconcerting to see Mounsey, who has built a following out of his frustration with the way politicians obfuscate and blather, having to take a similar tone to many of his hate-figures.  Had he told Andrew Neil to “fuck off” the YouTube hits would have doubled by a couple of orders of magnitude, and it probably wouldn’t have done the membership figures for the fledgeling Libertarian Party any damage either.
Instead, he has done this:

It is very difficult to delete anything on the internet and I am not going to pretend that I can do so. However, gradually the caches will fade away, and those parts of The Devil’s Kitchen that are most damaging—the incredibly violent (though fantastical) demises of various politicos and their grubby little hangers-on—will fade away eventually. … And so, here we are—with The Devil starting with a clean slate.

Now, I disagree with most of Mounsey’s output.  I think his libertarian philosophy is based on some false conceptions at its very heart, and I find his climate-change skepticism very odd.  On the other hand, I feel an unlikely kinship – as part of the Edinburgh blogging ‘scene’ back in the ‘6 we had plenty of banter, and I once had a beer with him during the festival.  Crucially, his blog contatined denunciations of me and my ridiculous views, driving traffic to my site.  For all these reasons, his decision to remove his blog archive from the internet makes me uncomfortable.  As I said before, deleting a blog feels like a book-burning.  Its an unlikely form of self-censorship, and feels very wrong.

Photo by pcorreia on Flickr
Photo by pcorreia on Flickr

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Judging a Book by its Cover

An event report I wrote for the English PEN website.

Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.
Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.

I’ll admit, I judged this event by its cover.
I assumed that an discussion titled ‘Judging a book by its cover’ would be about book jacket design, rich and fertile ground for ideas on culture and mass marketing.  I expected to hear bookseller Rick Gekoski wax about the beauty of a hardback first edition, and hear Joanna Prior explain how Penguin’s mass market paperbacks have become an iconic design in themselves.  I expected to hear how the large publishers are stifling creativity by homogenising the book design process.
And in fact, I did hear about all those things. However, I expected them to be within a discussion that was essentially about aesthetics. I did not expect to be faced, instead, with a more philosophical question: what is a book? Is it the paper, the cover and the binding? Or is it the words on the page? Continue reading “Judging a Book by its Cover”