Check out the first stuffafizing Post which links to this medium article,
it is official culture night after all…
Stuffafizing on Culture Night 2023
Thunder Flutter..
You will surely love the (possibly entirely apocryphal – or he himself might have told it) brilliant story about Professor Paul Muldoon returning to Norn Iron to judge a poetry competition. Paul decides, among reliable reams of epic and lyric, streams of Spenserian sonnets, vast vats of villanelles, buckets of blank verse and at least one hillock with a pastoral, that a single young bright kid actually won the competition outright with his poem called: ‘The Tortoise’, a short poem with the central image of a struggling Tortoise, with the magical line:
“the tortoise goes.. movey movey”
Cue, near riotous uproar among the adult educated intellect of assembled applicants if true. And I really want that story to be true. The story of a renowned poet who refused to crush a child’s sense of wonder and possibility, and not appease convention. I won second prize as an 11 year old with my poem, ‘Peace’ with the opening line: ‘Peace is but a flower among the weeds’ back in the dark 1970s, yes… but it was all downhill after that first line although in truth it was all my own work, almost winning up against other kids and their ambitious mammies work.
The poetry society in the UK, of which Chris Meade (RIP) was once director have opened their national poetry competition to everyone. If that’s your thing the application is here.
At 12, an entire school copybook full of my very first story ‘Frosty the Snowman’ prompted my primary school teacher to tell me I could possibly be a writer ‘WHEN I GREW UP’ This was actually the first of many times I heard that said, sometimes as an If rather than When statement…
At 17, the local newspaper editors typed reply to my rejected poem submission simply said: “These are unsuitable sentiments for a 17 year old.” Among the 40 plus poems within the creative sections of my Doctoral thesis lies one called ‘unsuitable sentiments’ It appears under the pseudonym of the imaginary Achill based poet John Pat McNamara. Yes let the sun shine upon us for I remain alive, and inspired by the muses.
I utterly abandoned poetry competitions, although I previously wrote funny verse (as opposed to what I consider actual or authentic poetry) about poetry competitions in the past, it got about 20,000 page views on my previous, spammed to death, old Drupel version of this website. (Which you may now notice has new SSL technology protecting you, with new back-up infrastructure behind it protecting me). The first post on that old banjaxed version was around 2006 and was a piece about a lack of a muse for technology… doah… and since I was working on my cameltext.net ludic poems then, why can’t technology be spiritual in that traditional sort of (non)sense ?
Anyway just like my friend Professor Leo Flores now former president of the ELO, I love epoetry, while still loving much traditional poetry. I enjoy creating and making poetry, enjoy reading it, learning about it, experimenting with all aspects of it, primarily as a philosophical, spiritual and textual exercise, an exploration of otherness, subconsciousness, technical mastery, as process that provides beginnings, foundations, filaments, fodder that frequently feeds other forms of writing.
And in the very same vein in which I understand and accept I will never win an All Ireland medal of any description, a seat in Dail Eireann nor any popularity contest on social media, I am certain I will never judge nor win a poetry competition, despite writing literally thousands of poems in the intervening forty years from that terse rejection, I haven’t entered any competitions since I was that rejected 17 year old would be Poet.
The very idea that there is a winning poem among thousands of potential personal already winning poems, for surely as a poet you win if you really believe you have successfully made or completed a true poem, faithfully expressed and finished it, rather than simply abandoning it as done. And if you are prepared to risk actually putting it into public view then it surely is a winner, of some sort, at least to you.
Poets may be the charlie sheen of writers, making it makes it so, the work is done, the juvenilia, silly sentimental satires, structured poetic effluent, true luminescence, and utter versified rubbish, short shape shrapnel, is it all or any of those things ? remains a creative and artistic if not human personal judgement, you have made a thing of which you are rightly proud and therefore you win. Who is the loser in that situation other than people who have no actual industrial or electrical machinery in sight or even in storage and yet specialize in charging you and others for the wisdom of their workshops in which you do the actual work ?
The concept of a winning poem reinforces hierarchical elitist thinking of twenty centuries ago . Unless it’s been written by Vogons, I’m up for reading it and making each one of them the winner, tradition, individual talents, or just a mates mate from her wife’s golf club, the cruel truth is a poet only really wins when… death decides.
So specifically for those amateur critics and poets whose magnum opus will be an overpriced lump of Ice cream on a stick, below is yet another one of my own personal winning poems. I awarded it the ultimate 0 Prize, since that logically comes before one in a descending numerical value sequence.. as yet A.I. can’t really handle ‘nothing’.
I have wanted to write this poem for a long time, inspired to do a bit more research, finally did today during a rare completely quite three hour period, to paraphrase a Kenny Everett Character… but am telling ya the plot…
(ab)normal screenwriting and digital service will resume in due course.
Dangerous Interior Dialogues
“Basic Income for the Arts…. it’s a gift.”
“Are you having a laugh, and on Sept 11th ? Don’t be obnoxious.”
While areas of the UK and Ireland began mourning a monarch or ‘brushing up’ on their singalonga country cowboy star skills, Thursday September 8th 2022 saw 2000 artists and arts workers across the republic of Ireland awarded an individual grant from our government to enable us to sustain and hopefully nurture our practice and artistic activity for the next three years. In my own view this is a measure that begins to recognize the genuine human value of the arts to our Irish society. What might it mean to an individual concerned ?
Well I’d be concerned that from over 9,000 applications made under the scheme, 8,200 were assessed as eligible and included in the randomised anonymous selection process. Yes you read that correctly ‘randomized selection process’. I previously wrote a submission when the department were first canvasing opinion and artists’ views on their proposed process and the only aspect of it I considered in any way flawed was that very idea that final selection would be basically down to chance.
The 2,000 grant awardees include all art forms, age groups, ethnicities from all counties in the republic. This includes 707 visual artists, 584 musicians, 204 artists working in film, 184 writers, 173 actors and artists working in theatre, 32 dancers and choreographers, 13 circus artists and 10 architects.
I got the above breakdown from Visual Artists Ireland press release here.
As one of the 184 writers one of my own early heroes the legendary Liverpudlian comedian and family entertainer Ken Dodd was not merely an amazing comic, singer, gag writer, ventriloquist but also a lifelong student of comedy itself, he maintained that the greatest gift we humans have is the gift of laughter, the gift of humour. He spent his long lifetime studying comedy yet few thought to take him seriously enough as to really drill down into his expert knowledge and opinion.
“When you start out as a comic, you must learn to let people laugh at you.”
Ken Dodd.
Encouraging audiences to laugh with us, or at us, was something I preached to every live comedy cast I’ve worked with, from amateur pub dramas in the 80s to various shows to TV pilots in the noughties, it’s not a matter of choice or taste, if you want to play a funny part in my funny script or be funny in our funny performance then please don’t bring some obtuse ego preservation idea about personal exclusive theatrical artistry as an artificial barrier to you being laughed at. If you harbour thoughts of being a writer yourself someday get used to being laughed at.
For some that is an understandably incredibly difficult place to be, specifically considering some of the insecurity journeys actors, writers, and artists must take to ‘make it’. I just remembered that very old cartoon with two cannibals eating a clown and one asks the other: ‘Does this taste funny to you ?” Being laughed at because you are being funny is a reward, being laughed at because others don’t or can’t understand you can feel like attempts by those others to steal your self worth, and feels so far from funny as is humanly possible to be. So when someone decides to satirize or laugh at some person, place, thing, or event there is always serious potential for damaging or hurting that someone, there is a line, and comedy writers in my view who funny walk it are usually the funniest.
Lines, walks, and cannibals aside, to paraphrase Doddy as purveyors of comedy we do steal people’s chuckle muscle and tickle it. Here Ken’s well-known joke: ‘I suffer from acute kleptomania. But when it gets bad, I take something for it’. In Ireland if an individual isn’t very good at their job wits observe: “He’s stealing a living” or in the specific case of highly over remunerated premiere league footballers, the oft heard recently: “That Maguire’s stealing a wage.”
But such observations are not reserved for far off, off form, sports stars or incompetent employees, and we can all assume that certain laughter itself is sometimes used not only as a weapon but also as a shield for perhaps more acerbic intentions, ‘insecurity’ for some is not a passive one way street nor that poorly texted limbo before an Aer Lingus Dublin departure.
Trying to ‘make it’ in whatever field of the arts in Ireland is rooted in insecurity and precarity, unless of course you are part of those beloved golden circles of awfully nice friends, know the good guys in Oar Tea Eeeeee, have a few bob, or attend exclusive tent, marquee, or similar hotel gatherings in Galway, trying to ‘make it’ independently without incurring financial ruin or accruing debts to others generosity means the business of show can indeed be a very funny old game to navigate successfully without causing (self)harm.
I saw yesterday the south Dublin Gazette piece about John Boyne ringing up his IT interviewer post the interview and post haste to say something like, I didn’t mean Sally Rooney when I said all the young Irish writers were writing the same stupid campus novel about nothing. He could ask Rosemary Jenkins what happens in Ireland if you observe the truth that there exist large swaths of published or lauded writers on the island of Ireland that are enthusiastically promoted by their own symbiotic circles without genuine literary analysis, impartial review, or honest critique. All great art may be parochial but the parish supporting their own brings with it reciprocated responsibility if not loyalty, to the central parochial value of solidarity under all circumstances and conditions to that parish and it’s members. The introduction of the concept of ‘conflict of Interest’ to Ireland’s small literary circles would cause more commotion than shamrock rovers fans at an English regal event.
“ All comedy, is tragedy, if you only look deep enough into it.”
English Novelist and Poet Thomas Hardy
There was something wholly tragic and not at all funny for the 6028 Artists and arts workers who applied and then waited months for the department’s decision on a scheme that opened for applications from 12th April – 12th May 2022. Some waiting almost four months only to be told: apologies you were not selected in the randomized final stages and will not receive the grant. To a younger more insecure me that could also suggest, I will not be seen, not be acknowledged, I will never be helped nor realize any of my ambitions. So understandably my own heart sinks and genuinely goes out to those individuals so close and yet so far, David Walliams ‘computer says no’ as genuine human tragedy. The linguistic ‘luck of the draw’ for so many talented artists a line even this irreverent writer struggles with.
Yet open minded writers, if they have been around for as long as I have, are already intimately acquainted with rejection, actors and artists similarly so. I was genuinely shocked and surprised to be awarded a place on the scheme, I obviously fulfill the professional criteria and passed the eligibility tests, it’s just (as you may know if you’ve read any of my other posts here) As a working class writer from a border town I have long-standing ideological issues with the arts council, and similar organizations like Create Ireland, etc, specifically in a similar vein to that of the monarchy in England with their endowed soft power of their role in shaping society in their own image. So with this scheme coming directly from the Government Department itself directly responsible for the arts, it efficiently cuts out that entire administrative layer of time wasting middle management data obsessed quangos that often make offers of friendly guidance while usually demanding their logo must be seen on everything you do. uncertain and unnamed entities that associate with the wins yet are rarely seen in the vicinity of personal losses, those that want the associated comedy without any of the underlining independent sorrow of the tragedy.
From the age of 18 I was completely self-funded as a writer, theatre maker and game developer until our then local arts officer Mary Cloake gifted me a year as a paid writer in residence with the UDC (Urban District Council). It was the equivalent of a dole payment but it was briefly being paid to write full time for the first time in my life, so I got to write and produce my first semi-professional two act play called Issac’s Legacy. Alas the UDC is no more and Mary Cloake joined the Arts Council as Regions Officer in 1993, was appointed Development Director in 1997 and ascended to Director in 2004, eventually leaving in 2011.
In the years between writing and performing my first comedy scripts in 1982 and before Mary’s various elevations I applied to the arts council for numerous grants for playwrighting and theatre without success. During the early 1990s there was little analogue artwork being done let alone any digital or interactive artifacts being created. Windows 95 really started the PC revolution but I made my first game in 1983 on a C64, I already had qualifications and practical experience working in electronics when I married in 1988 aged 23 with a 1000 pound bill for my first electronic word processor, it took me a couple of years to pay that off but I was rewarded when my comedy writing work saw me invited to the BBC young scriptwriter of the year competition finals in Belfast.
I joined various Irish based writer societies and groups, I spent a half a year designing a theatre based training course with the generous help of Abbey Theatre and École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris Marcel Marceau personnel but ultimately found myself usurped by parochial apparatchiks from FAS. Despite attempted oppression by various closed minded philistines, I eventually got some professional work going, raised the money to establish a travelling theatre company, wrote and toured my multimedia one man play ‘Ham Let Loose’, applied again to the arts council for various grants, received nothing other than rejection after rejection. So I went to study theatre part-time in Maynooth, thumbing lifts from Dundalk to Maynooth and back at all hours of the day and night for a couple of years.
When Mary Cloake was appointed development director of the arts council I had already stopped applying, the fact that we had a very basic prior funding history I felt would create more spurious questions than answers if I ever did actually manage to get any type of grant, and up to that point, among all the wasted hours and crumbled paper, I had zero evidence to support the idea that the Arts Council would ever encourage me to apply for any grants, despite putting all my eggs into the national arts basket. Consequently since I was already highly PC and Mac literate I channeled my energies and expertise into founding Ireland’s only SCEE Licensed game development studio Taintech Creative Studios, I was using primitive 3D modelling software and state of the then art desktop printing QuarkXPress to visual ideas and designs I had already begun making digital work under the moniker clevercelt and made my first version of that ‘digital text art’ website in 1996.
Meeting internationally renowned developers across the world at various game developer events and being invited to Japan in 1999 by the Head of Development of Sony Computer Entertainment based purely on my various game designs, design documents and game bibles for SONY Playstation, that specific trip to Japan changed my own perception of my actual potential talent, of my imaginative story making gifts, the length of the road already traveled at that point seemed long, it changed my understanding of a then emerging and morphing craft.
During those previous years basically 1982 to 1996 I also wrote assorted television and theatre scripts, RTE accepted my ‘Friends’ script for the Access Community Drama Series and cameras were all set to roll in Dundalk until the equity union objected to amateur involvement in professional television, when so many actors were unemployed (or resting) thus the entire series was unceremoniously shelved. After that RTE television rejected outright every single script I sent them, telling me I needed an agent if I wanted them to read my work, yet jokes I’d written popped in here and there unacknowledged, that’s what really put a stop to my unsolicited submissions. So obviously while working professionally in other places, interacting with various professional bodies my career was progressing on certain artistic fronts but failing miserably on the financial or traditional creative industries inroads front and I received zero support from anyone other than my immediate family. That journey becomes an even harder road when there is no sustenance to be found.
The story of Taintech is something I am writing in detail about elsewhere thus I won’t rehash it here, but suffice to say that in March 2001 post Taintech and a 50K research project I conceived and managed, I joined Microsoft’s Xbox and PC games Division. Within Microsoft I had Dublin program management responsibility for the Xbox Launch Title Rallisport Challenge and also the EMEA editions of Microsoft’s then flagship PC entertainment product Flight Simulator. We were nearing RTM and preparing for the October launch of tens of millions of dollars of Flight Simulator product and promotion when the Twin Towers tragedy began to unfold. In the initial speculation about flying into the towers our product was all over American media, it was said the hijackers had trained to fly the planes using the MS FS product, there was a series of calls and meeting hurriedly arranged, again that specific time, Microsoft, media lab, IGDA, Havok, etc are some things I am writing about in more detail but I offer it just as a snapshot of the fact that from the first moment that the news that a plane may have hit the world trade centre went out on the wires our entire team became transfixed to the unfolding human tragedy, then our full floor of staff, soon the entire office, the whole site, then the country, then the world, a horrendous tragedy on a scale never before witnessed by so many, it was, and remains, a societal traumatic event, much like the thirty years of terrorism by the IRA, the UVF, various paramilitaries and the state sponsored terrorism of the British state itself during my own lifetime. And as Yeats observed in his Easter 1916: “Too long a sacrifice, Can make a stone of the heart.”
Living through the 1981 hunger strikes and another economic recession that saw further waves of emigration, twenty years earlier amid weeping thronged streets of black flag protest marches, mourning and anger, injustice, powerlessness and general malaise, it was a world away from warm International Television conferences, brightly lit Networking events, foreign food, exotic sights, the various and numerous invitations to parties which I readily accepted twenty years later when I decided to leave Microsoft and later again after leaving the Midas Media Cluster, a time when I also went back to school to do an MA in Creative Writing and New Media in DMU in the UK in 2006, it was thee only one of it’s kind in the British isles at that time. Again like my return to theatre education in Maynooth, it was part-time and required a couple of trips to the UK but entirely worth the considerable effort and expense as it was truly and highly innovative, it was mostly online, so I could do what most working class artists, writers, and students must do, which is to work while you study. I may therefore consider myself to be more than simply lucky to have received this grant, I may be fortunate, blessed, steeped in luck..
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sadly Chris Meade (RIP) a unique talent, also the other male from our initial DMU course cohort, passed away recently, and Chris a few years after finishing his MA, like me, decided to pursue a PhD in Creative Writing. I went to UCD and that is a book in itself, for another day, I finished writing up its 120K words of poetry, code, prose, video, commentary, analysis in 2013. I thereafter got sucked back into doing some consulting and teaching. Which I did up until my dear mother became really ill in September 2019 at a time when I was working 60+ hours a week as a head of department, course and programme leader, lecturer, until the very weekend my dear departed mother went into a care home on Thursday I wrote this article on linkedin late on the following Saturday evening, an article which ultimately resulted in my parting company with my then employer. I wrote it as a funny article but institutions do not have a sense of humor and many insecure people mistakenly interpreted the well worn memes as something I specifically created to be about them, have I mentioned insecurity yet?
Since that time the covid pandemic curtailed a world of plans and ambitions for so may creative people, not just me, as I became unemployed just as the pandemic hit, I got only basic dole payments as opposed to my 70K+ per year. So nearly two years later when the opportunity to apply for this grant arose, I applied throwing my hat in the ring with zero expectation, the financial worth of the grant to me is less than 25% of my pre pandemic income, but as outlined I have been writing on and off for almost forty years, now at this vital juncture it’s again a choice between commercial magnetism and three years of the creative life; lived. I have an Ikigai diagram somewhere about this stuff..
As my previous entry states I lost a second uniquely creative friend when Jeremy Height shuffled off his mortal coil and evaporated into a cloud of interstellar mimetic intelligence merely a month ago now. If not now ? when ? is my question with regard to full time writing… What this grant does for me personally is exactly as promised on the tin, it gives me basic income security to follow my creative vision without constantly worrying about where I will get the money to pay my mortgage.. it enables me to write full time.
For me, and perhaps only me, it also places a responsibility on me to produce work that justifies my selection for this grant, this luck, this gift that I have been given, approximately 40 years after first hoping I might get one, is more than welcome, and I am grateful for it.
peace out… more to follow…
In Memory of Jeremy Hight.
In pre-covid pandemic 2019 I tried to do something that’s ingrained in all my creative endeavors, I tried to do something unique, something new, ‘something outside the norm’. I was given the opportunity to deliver an ELO keynote in UCC in 2019, for me that became about bringing the unique voices of other members of the electronic literature organization, those physically outside the conference itself, unable to attend for whatever reason, into very center stage, to put their (remote) views on offer.
I first spoke a bit about why I was on the stage and how the auditorium audience would get to chose from sixteen authors/ topics to create the second half of that keynote.
The first elit creator chosen by the audience was Jeremy Hight. When I had previously asked Jeremy to send me something he’d like to say in my keynote if chosen, he wrote the following, (Which is unedited from his original reply) the audience responded first by a very short silence, followed by applause:
“Electronic literature honestly saved my life. I as a kid studied philosophy, meteorology , etymology, writing and anything on odd science and nature I could get my little hands on. I was tested in third grade and moved to a school that had Nasa visit us and give us space ice cream (a treasure of treasures even if freeze dried basically) and voyager photos. We were little calculators given mass amounts of data and mostly memorization tasks. My parents got a call when I got a B in fifth grade. It led to boredom and tuning out and eventually burn out in 9th grade to the highest degree. A teacher in honors English even snuck me out to Burger King at lunch to give me a pep talk as she felt bad watching this tall shy kid evaporate and fail.“
“High school saw math hit me head on at 100 mph and the PHD in experimental meteorology software development become impossible. I still loved words and writing and a teacher jumped out like a bat after graduation from a shadowy bush to tell me to keep writing (thank you) and won some teen awards but still felt it was all incomplete. In college I had ideas for poems made of soil types in deserts and by rivers, to be projected on fog, to be novels composed of seeming junk in drawers in old furniture. My first published poem outside of school was a poem made mostly of numbers published in Prakalpana in India. It was comparing the sun to zero on a number line. It was closer but still it was painful how the science and philosophy lied dormant and experimental writing was depositing into familiar tropes and fields.”
“After my MFA in writing at Calarts it seemed for a time that all was to be echoes, to be encased and calcified in forms and functions. It was massively depressing and deflating to be honest. Then a friend called and we made a gps driven narrative. It hit me first that text could skin the world with signal. It then came clear that much more importantly technology and creativity could give place a voice.”
“Since then I have worked in anti-blogs, ar poetics laid out with semantics based on location and elevation, netprovs, poetry edited by earthquakes and now artificial intelligence infused prose and poetry that reacts to how it is read and grows or shrinks and has a bit of sentience.”
“E-lit to me is almost quantum (made a quantum mechanics narrative years back but it was obnoxious to read..lol ) in its range and possible attempts at core defining characteristics or parameters. The field is ever growing and the future is about to open doors never before possible to explore. It also to me is a family even as we are spread out across the globe. I am thankful daily for this.”
“If I had to attempt a specific definition it would be a fog of words but basically writing made possible and permutations of textuality made possible by technology.”
“For me it is home.”
Jeremy and I knew each other for perhaps ten years, we never got to meet in person but we exchanged many many emails, calls, drafts, and works, we both shared a common attitude about writing and art, that it should be different, new, something challenging, something maybe not so serious at times. A contributor to his Nibus Face-sine, shut down by Facebook, eventually the effect of the pandemic took its toll on the mental health of many people, my own included, added to that were parental bereavements on both sides, my own mother and Jeremy’s father. The pay and conditions for writing teachers are not ideal on either side of the Atlantic but as Jeremy and I discussed more than once, it can be particularly challenging when you don’t easily fit into the standard definitions or modes of creation used by universities to employ their friends’ friends. I will miss Jeremy, for more reasons than can be written here. My heart goes out to his partner Lisa and all who had the privilege of knowing Jeremy.
The fundraiser for Jeremy’s funeral is here:
Ode to C…
I hope to write a proper review of Annette Vee’s ‘Coding Literacy’ book (below) soon. It is among a raft of books I read again in an attempt to garner the current state of contemporary literary practice but more specifically the teaching of contemporary creative writing practices across the globe in the context of our current technological milieu.
Obviously there are not many Irish Writers of ‘Digital Literature’ nor numerous creative writers who eschew print, the print establishment or it’s feeder network of educational institutions in Ireland.
Ireland is still a relatively small place with 5.1 Million people (in the republic) and merely 7 Million on the Island as a whole (N.I. has 1.9 million). To put that in context there are 55 cities in the world with a larger population than our entire island landmass, so when we consider the impact of Irish writers worldwide it is quite remarkable that we still enjoy such a positive reputation for being poets, novelists, masters of language and spinners of yarns.
Perhaps because of our acknowledged ‘soft power‘ and our legacy of waves of emigration, past associations with missionaries, generation after generation of poor Irish people travelling across the world and bringing aspects of their culture with them, we have spread the stories of our little home. A home that has since become a lot more technologically sophisticated.
In recent decades the Irish Development Authority (IDA) have done a magnificent job marketing our country abroad to attract further technology companies to set up EMEA headquarters here. All major tech companies are here in one guise or another and there is genuine FOMO if you don’t have an Irish Office. Since the british car crash that is Brexit Ireland is now also the sole English speaking gateway to Europe for other western nations.
Two major currents are flowing here right now, high levels of both traditional and digital literacy. The latest wave of innovation to hit the tech sector here is focused on A.I. and various alternative reality, and Web3 technologies, specifically DLT and blockchain.
I wrote a short essay on medium called ‘Why A.I. Write’ about some intersections, specifically with regard to creative writing and A.I. If you do have about twenty minutes read it (or have it read by pressing the listen button there), then please leave a comment either below or over on medium.
I am currently writing a longer work that also examines some of the poetic aspects of Coding C, C++ and C#. As with the post title here I am planning to call that work: Ode to C.
Reduced to Clear………..
All writers Are readers – publishing is not writing.
Welcome again to my little wholly independent corner of the writing, and therefore reading, world.
On this really sunny day here in Ireland, I re-read this illuminating interview with the amazing Margaret Randall and was compelled to share it with friends, readers, fellow writers, website visitors and (later) students.
In my view, the print books business here in Ireland often short-changes many of it’s customers or ‘real life readers‘ by really pushing and promoting that whole ’emerging’ and ‘up and coming’ writers paradigm, it feels like it may often be more about securing and promoting contracted (owned) talent than actually curating careers or offering genuine diversity to a reading public.
Current commercial strategies also sell these fixed agendas within an industry of cultural gatekeepers to the aspirants facing the very barriers to entry that industry erected. As I write here often, (or did for 20 years before the site got spammed out of existence) the book publishing and distribution industry is simply not ‘the writing life’ it is only (with a few rare and valuable exceptions) about commerce, money, and profit.
I don’t want to offer spoilers here to Margaret’s interview so the links here should be enough for now, suffice to say I will be including some of Margaret’s work in my up and coming playshop sessions and I will be asking participants to read this interview as part of our discussions around memoir and technology, and the contemporary writer’s online life.
Stuffafizing should be up and running soon.. thanks to those who have already signed up.
“My word” #blibloading ; joy for twitter wreaders and not the usual social media epistles at dawn.
I created the hashtag and neologism ‘#blibloading’. There was no word to describe the act of downloading other people’s pictures of their books, allowing for checking them out and deciding whether any of them are must reads.
Perhaps only writers or true bibliophiles will understand that urge, (or sentence) and ‘my word’ blibloading could itself not be invented before 1996 prior to the www. Yes the phenomena of @bookshelfporn obviously exists but that’s a lot more impersonal and concerns a lusty aesthetics for book filled shelves, rather than a singularly gawking online snapshot into other people’s photographed reading or book buying habits.
‘My word’ was always a gentle expression of surprise I associated with English upper and middle class friends.
Not that I actually have any.
The word on the interwebs was that it promised improvements in information and communication democratization, long and longer tails of niche pursuits and some heretofore sharing of interests, however obscure, as not merely possible but crucial for ‘a web based newer form of communication’.
The early friendlier net already did remediated letters, scrolls, epistles, notes, memos, etc, in various electronic formats via listservs, bulletin boards, etc, but social media platforms of today better facilitate speedy synchronous exchange either night or day, or yes, even at dawn for that matter.. but only if we embrace such new purposes and altered uses.
Yes questions arise; If you can’t judge a book by its cover could you judge it by a social media account or a couple of its tweets ? Traditional or mainstream interests have swamped social media such that much of its true human value potential appears lost in impure pursuits of profit and profile. I mostly use social media to connect with writers and coders, artists, etc whom I want to learn from or more about. After an initial flourish I culled my FB connections down from 4K to 1K or so, I’ve kept my linkedin at around 1.5K but as @cleverelt I follow almost 4K people on twitter and will probably continue to follow more as I encounter them. I don’t use any of my social media as marketing tools as I to date have had nothing to market… or promote….
Others certainly do, and like Laurence O’Bryan (@LPOBryan – @SeeNewBooks ) appear to be making a fantastic job of it. However some wonderfully talented writers have come relatively late to these social media parties and as a consequence have had to sit back with small follower numbers while watching other strategy savvy social media makers stride center stage, brand in hand, selling books, raising their profile and the profiles of others, while others stuff schedules and scatter content, garnering and gathering large follower numbers proffering a valuable blend of virtue signalling and semi-soft sell. To them too I sincerely say ‘fair play’.
“We know cream always rises to the top, but sometimes it can curdle before getting there.”
Me (To some writers still waiting in the twitter wings)
Work not promoted by the mainstream publishing houses and their controlled promotional arms may not reach these long tailed parts a friendly personal social media can. Irrespective of their various accounts, money, media, people, and brand guises, most of my own book purchases come from recommendations from fellow writers and friends across social media, those with whom I am (& feel) connected.
I am not sure that it’s still there, but there was a notice backstage in the lyric theatre Belfast that spoke to me about relationships between writers, artists, actors, creators, performers and their supporters and friends:
“Please do not ask for passes for your friends, if they won’t pay to see you….. who will ?”
Lyric Backstage Notice
I recently followed the writer @andrewhankinson over on twitter and bought two of his books which are next up in my reading pile (see the image below). As you do, I flicked through the newly purchased books, basically because Bibliosmia always beats unboxing . Unlike flicking through older shelved books which may hold earlier secretly stashed cash from another era (We wish).
In some senses blibloading is Twitter meeting Tsundoku I suppose, but serendipity and synchronicity are wonderful aspects of modern creative life. For someone like me who has spent much time and energy with technology and creativity mostly framed formally, theoretically, academically, or seen through some sort of pristine professional practice lens, in a pandemic world, honest human connection and the hairy edges of existence blend better into authenticity when the elements of luck or chance intrude.
I have been working on a couple of commissions lately and I am looking forward to writing about those and other activities. Like so many others I lost someone close to me during the Covid 19 pandemic, and normal service has simply not been resumed, I doubt it ever will. I want to write something about the incredible connections between two of the books above in the respective images of six covers and the seven in a pile, I will do that if I ever get the time to.
Finally do feel free to comment, I get lots of comments, mostly Spam, which now has it’s own uses for me, but I do enjoy genuine comments.
I’d like to thank those of you who have kindly already signed up to my (ir)regular newsletter that’s about all sorts of stuff…. It is something that I am finally getting around to working on alongside all the other abnormal creative stuff, I’ve called the newsletter:
Stuffafizing
https://clevercelt.substack.com/p/coming-soon?
Venus in our Castletown River
The raised concentration of trees in the distance above the river at the centre of the twilight image is Castletown motte, or Cúchulainn‘s castle. In simpler times it was part of our teenage playground, and where my friends and I first encountered the material reality of Irish mythology taught at school. My photo also shows the reflection of the planet Venus in my local river from a point on ‘the big bridge’.
Modern industries have created their own myths to serve their purpose of profit and shareholder value. We as a society daily participate, spread, and reinforce such market driven myths; the myth of efficiency, the myth of merit, the myth of equality. Societies solely driven by economics and market forces visibly stratify various groupings, Shakespearean Plebeians below their Patricians or an Aristocracy above born into a right to rule. As above, not so below. Today’s billionaire class are both figuratively and literally out of sight.
There is evident entitlement that accompanies being in a more economically advantageous ‘position’. Whether the offspring of a surgeon or clock-maker or child of an unmarried mother, one of the greatest myths to persist in Ireland today is the possibility and desirability of social mobility, the idea that we are born into one economic level in our society but can and should ascend (further compete) in(to) higher social positions, enjoying consequent improved personal prosperity. Were it true, might it be worth wanting ?
The American Dream was built on such a concept, European fairy stories are crammed with it, believing in the proximity of attainable prosperity rungs keeps a globalized lid on the archetypal parochial Irish begrudger while also encouraging various arms of the Irish civil service to intermarry one another. We love the idea that such myths are really truths. There is justice and fairness and people in power will do the right thing, despite so much evidence to the contrary.
The benefits of Success are no longer about a shared myth but just another hard commercial commodity to be bought and sold, listed and exploited, aligned and structured, a fact that makes me quite sad.
A recent press release from my local football club aligns them with a british gambling company through shirt sponsorship, I had already reached 100 meaningless spam comments on this website a number of weeks ago, those two unconnected facts prompted me to write this post.
Thanks for reading..
After the Reset… New Beginnings.
Hi there,
that old version of my website (12+ years of Drupal) was completely corrupted by a spammer, my then hosting provider explained to me, after I requested they please restore that deleted content, that they did not, in fact, provide any back-ups of the server which hosted my website(s)..
The truly ephemeral nature of life reflected in the bleak professional ineptitude of a bunch of ‘chancers’ calling themselves service providers.
and thus moving on to our new beginnings…. Thanks for visiting I really appreciate it..
this new version of my website will be updated with various types of creative content as days and weeks trundle on.. I also hope to excavate some of the more visited/popular legacy content if.. (BIG IF) I can find it.