Scrapbook

“And I’m still not sure that story is that important to stories. You know, all that beginning, middle, end stuff, narrative arc blah, blah, blah. Games people go on about it all the time, and ad people are convinced they’re masters of story miniatures. I think, very often, story is just something to hang all the important bits on. And not in a significant, meaningful way, like a backbone or a scaffold. It’s more of a coat-hanger. The actual stuff that connects isn’t about plot or narrative; it’s texture, observations, images, jokes, juxtapositions, felicitous phrases and little moments of aha. That seemed true last night, all the stories were about something that had happened, but that wasn’t the important bit. What sticks in the head is how the story was told, not what the story was.”

“Now, I have to assume that anyone asking about “worth the time” already has at least 32pp of content they want to do something with, right? Because, if not, the question that’s really being asked is “Can you give me some excuse to make something?”– and really, fuck those people. Because if what you want to know is, if you get your thumb out of your backside and actually do something, is someone going to pay you for it? Well, you’re looking at the wrong career, kiddo. You don’t actually care about publishing so much as you wouldn’t mind a no-risk game that gets you a book and some money at the end of it. If, you know, someone can assure you there’s a book and some money at the end of it before you do anything.”

“[Paul Morley’s] book Words and Music is the monolithic equivalent of the great rhetorical television series of the past, the likes of Civilisation, The Ascent of Man and Connections. It’s very nearly a conflation of all three, with a bit of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos thrown in and left to ferment in a crashed car in JG Ballard’s garden for a thousand years. Sometimes I think Morley wrote it because he knew he’d never get to do it as a TV show.”

“Beginnings matter.”

“The marketing of “marital aids”, as they were once known, has undergone something of a sea change in recent years, with the likes of LoveHoney and Anne Summers turning their use from a signifier of guilt and loneliness into a loving expression of liberated sexuality. Whether the users of the Fleshlight fall into that category is another matter - LoveHoney does not allow us to play with their data, only their pre-made maps, so we can’t tell you which town sells more devices for the single gentleman, and which for the lady - and perhaps suggest some kind of twinning…”

“i want my cake plus i want to eat it plus i want it to change the future.”

“It used to be there were just a few media: telly, radio, books, phones, those kind of things. But I don’t think it makes sense to say that the Web is simply one more medium. The different services built on top of the Web have such different qualities: they are differently social; differently permanent or ephemeral; differently immersive or ambient. Flickr is a medium. YouTube is a medium. Blogs are a medium. What gave a medium its characteristics used to be the technology itself – the pipes and means of production – but with the Web that’s no longer true. What makes a medium a medium is itself up for design. The Web is not one medium, it is too fluid for that. The Web is ten thousand media, and you get to choose and invent which you use.”

“8×11 pages are big, and take work to fill. A 20-page MagCloud mag would come out at USD $4 before you added your mark-up, and it’d cost around USD $1.40 to mail it out to me, currently. That’d make a fascinating Dogme MagCloud, wouldn’t it? 20pp, $1 markup for a total $5 object, so that’s a hair under six and a half Yanqui dolla to get it to my door. But: with MagCloud and other POD operations, it’s dead cheap (to the point of almost being costless) to experiment, and the single biggest headache of publishing — physical distribution — is solved for you. (That is the fascinating problem Newspaper Club presents: they’ll ship your pallet of newspapers to you, but getting rid of them is entirely your problem. Which makes them either a hyperlocal object or the subject of much envelope-stuffing. Which is a pain. I kind of love the work their blog is doing to reduce expectations, a sort of “no, really, we’re far more rubbish than we look.”)”

“I suspect, if we had ways to see it, we’d realise we just passed through a Great Depression of the social world.”