About Wordsworth

 

I am grateful to Robert Hutton for live-tweeting his perusal of Nadine Dorries’ new book. To be honest, when I saw the extract above, it rather reinforced my belief that her appointment as Culture Secretary was Boris Johnson’s idea of a Situationist prank – let’s find someone who wouldn’t recognise the most crushingly obvious slice of English verse if it bit off her face and put her in charge of poetry, among other things – but, hey, at least she admits to her ignorance.

What startles me more is that nobody at any point in the editorial process noticed that she’d got the quote wrong.

About corrections

Apologies for literary errors often sound defensive, but I think we’ll let him off this time. (Hugues Panissié, from the 1960 edition of The Real Jazz.)

About footnotes

At the beginning of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, about the ills of social media:

In writing this book, I set out to avoid burdening it with references and scholarship. I want it to be read as an essay, rather than as a polemic or an academic work. But for anyone who wants to know more, or simply finds themselves asking, ‘How does he know that?’ there are bibliographical notes at the end. If you find yourself itching to research a quote, statistic, or fact, simply skip to the end and search under the page number for the relevant phrase.

You see, I’ve never understood this hostility to footnotes, but every time I’ve written a book, I’ve been encouraged by editors to rein in my enthusiasm, because they put people off, apparently. When did references and scholarship become a burden? (There are notes in the Seymour book, but they're tucked away at the back, so as not to scare the more fragile reader.)

About Maxwell Perkins

I keep coming back to the little dance that all writers and other purveyors of fact must dance, between going over the heads of their intended audience and insulting their intelligence. As I suggested in relation to Barthes, it’s ultimately subjective: OK, maybe I know who Isaac Newton is, but not Bachelard or Hjemslev, but that doesn’t apply universally. Except... seriously? I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of Pointless contestants who don’t know who wrote the Principia, but what proportion of those are on top of French epistemology and/or Danish linguistics in the mid-20th century? (And, yes, I had to Google those.)

And here’s another example. In the New Yorker, Jordan Orlando offers yet another bloody article about The White Album in which he introduces George Martin as “the Beatles’ Maxwell Perkins”. To be honest, I think Orlando’s choice is a little less preposterous than that of Barthes; there will be very few people who know the editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but not the Beatles’ producer, but I suspect there are more than those who know Hjemslev but not Newton. And, because this is all about knowing your audience, I reckon all of them read the New Yorker.

And that just gives me the perfect opportunity to remind you of the work of Rutherford Chang.


PS: And this is interesting too: she even has a stab at Revolution #9.

About sensitivity

An interesting article from the Chicago Tribune about the trend for publishers and authors to hire “sensitivity readers” to scan texts for That Which May Offend. A couple of excerpts:

Clayton [one of the readers], who is black, sees her role as a vital one. “Books for me are supposed to be vehicles for pleasure, they're supposed to be escapist and fun,” she says. They're not supposed to be a place where readers “encounter harmful versions” and stereotypes of people like them.

Vehicles for pleasure? Escapist and fun? Why would you pay for your book to be read by someone who has such a reductive view of what reading is for? Then author Kate Messner opines:

I wouldn’t dream of sending those books out into the world without getting help to make sure I’m representing those issues in a way that’s realistic and sensitive.

Realistic and sensitive? If you had to make a choice between the two, Kate, which would you pick?

About editing

I’ve seen the editing process from both sides and I’ve been brutal and I’ve been brutalised. (It toughens you up for the reviews, they say.) But the annotated manuscript of the aborted book by tiresome alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos takes things to new levels. My favourite, albeit not the harshest: “The use of phrases like ‘two-faced backstabbing bitches’ diminishes your overall point.”

About Girlz Wetter

I’ve been sorting through a whole load of storage crates over the past few weeks, some of which have been undisturbed for 13 years or more. Inevitably some of the contents prompt a certain sting of nostalgia: in a few cases I can recall the precise circumstances in which I acquired a particular book or record, or wrote or drew something. But I’m also coming across things that push no buttons whatsoever, even if I feel they ought to.

One such example is this copy of the fanzine Girlz Wetter. Although maybe calling it a fanzine is to overstate its significance. It’s a single A4 sheet of pink paper, folded into a pamphlet tiny enough to fit in your wallet. There’s a review of a gig by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, an interview with Jef Steartfield of Plan A (me neither) and a rather NSFW 14-point “Guide to Being a Groupie”. And that’s your lot, as the back cover announces in no uncertain terms.

The thing is, I have no memory of how I came into possession of this piece. At first I assumed I must have got hold of it in about 1997/8, when I spent a lot of time on the Camden gig circuit: it was hidden amidst a pile of compilation CDs from that era, boasting tracks by the likes of Dweeb, Midget and The Bigger The God. But the Yeah Yeah Yeahs reference pitches it forwards, to 2001 at the earliest.

What’s interesting about that is that by then it would already have been something of a throwback, as the early rumblings of blogging and social media started to encroach of the turf of print zines. And what’s more, it makes no attempt to perform even those limited gestures of social interaction that print can offer. There’s no information about who the author may be, not even a pseudonym; no contact details, not even a good old analogue PO Box; it’s just there, in your face, make of it what you will. It’s entirely devoid of context, whether in itself or in terms of my own memories. And there’s something rather magnificent about that. I’d be intrigued to know who created it, but at the same time, I quite like the state of ignorance in which I find myself.

Nothing to see here

You may have noticed that Thailand is now under martial law, but that’s not the same as a coup. Older readers of this blog may recall the coup of September 2006 and my baffled responses thereto, which led to a couple of interesting years writing for The Guardian’s Comment is Free site. Anyway, nostalgia and semantic quibbles aside, very little seems to have changed here, there are no bullets pinging off nearby walls and Bangkok traffic is still abysmal. If you were soppy and sentimental enough to be even the slightest bit concerned, please stop or I’ll get all tearful.

Back in 2006, my usual method for writing a blog post would have been to find an article in The Guardian and get slightly annoyed with it for 500 words or so. So in that spirit may I first draw your attention to the thoughts of one Zillah Byng-Maddick, who sounds like an obscure slice of beatnik slang (“man, the way that cat played those bongos was zillabingmatic”) but is in fact the CEO of Future Publishing. She envisages a business model in which the lines between content (what used to be known as editorial) and marketing are blurred to the point of irrelevance so as to reach a point at which

...our expert, trusted content enables us to attract large communities of highly engaged customers who want to buy things, and that’s exceptionally appealing to our clients.

The problem is that those customers (I think she means readers) are only “highly engaged” up to the point at which they feel they’ve stopped reading an article and are instead being cold-called by someone who wants to sell them something. When that happens they tend to turn their attention elsewhere.

Now, some would argue that the average reader doesn’t much care about such niceties, that she or he will happily absorb reams of crass, blatant plugging and hype while strap-hanging on the 7:43 from Rickmansworth so long as there’s a celebrity angle or a horoscope or something about cakes or a decent pair of knockers attached. Well, think again. Readers — some of them, at least — are deeply sensitive souls, to the extent that the slightest deviation from sweetness and light can tip them over the edge into a traumatised, catatonic state. This is the case at least for students from the University of California at Santa Barbara and other institutions who have requested that literary works contain “trigger warnings” lest the unsuspecting reader should chance across references to racism or suicide or, well, pretty much anything that isn’t very nice. The warnings for a work such as American Psycho would probably be longer than the book itself. “It seems to me that that way madness lies,” says John Mullan of UCL, shamefully neglecting to preface his comment with a trigger warning about references to madness, lying and seeming.

Of course, the obvious thing would be to preface all Future publications with a trigger warning that everything contained therein is a bit of marketing copy and readers unduly sensitive to such nastiness should steer clear. How zillabingmatic would that be?

PS: Padraig Reidy very good on triggers at Index on Censorship. 

PPS: And Jay Caspian Kang in the New Yorker.

Renowned author Dan Brown has written a new Dan Brown book that is probably brown

Yes, just as people are finally starting to get bored with EL James and her various hues of hanky-panky, the real boss of unaccountably successful bad writing promises a new tome, Inferno. Now, I’ve given myself several bouts of mental cramp attempting to get to grips with Brown’s appeal, to the extent of starting a blog that attempted to apply some sort of literary analysis to The Da Vinci Code, but ultimately I’m none the wiser. Do most people just not care about bad writing? Or is there something in the wonky syntax and juddering exposition that actually appeals? Incidentally, if you haven’t read Sebastian Faulks’s note-perfect pastiche of Brown’s style, you’ve missed out.

What intrigues me about the latest news is not the book itself (Brown vs Dante, apparently, ho hum) but what the publisher has to say about it. Bill Scott-Kerr of Transworld declares:

I've been working with Dan Brown for over a decade now and every time he delivers a new novel, he never fails to surprise. As a storyteller, he has the great gift of being able to take you on a breathtaking rollercoaster ride at the same time as offering a fresh perspective on what he's showing us along the way. This brilliant Robert Langdon thriller is no exception-in Inferno he returnes to the heart of old Europe and to the territory so compellingly occupied by The Da Vinci Code. It's another star turn from start to finish.

You know how dogs supposedly get to resemble their masters, or vice versa? Could it be that Scott-Kerr’s years with Brown have led to some of the latter’s literary anti-style rubbing off? Look at that first sentence, with the redundant juxtaposition of “every time” and “never”. Then the lame cliché of “a breathtaking rollercoaster ride” from which you’re supposed to get some kind of perspective. “Returnes” is presumably just a typo, and I don’t know whether it came from Transworld or The Bookseller, so we’ll let that one rest, but “so compellingly occupied”? I mean, what? And then two more clichés in the final sentence. 

I’ll give Mr Scott-Kerr the benefit of the doubt; I’m guessing he can actually write a decent press release when he chooses to do so, but made the conscious choice to write a bad one, because otherwise he’d only draw attention to how badly written the main product will be. So, in a way, it’s good writing, because it does its job. Although, by that logic, Dan Brown’s writing is good writing too. Whatever circle of hell he’s working from.

PS: For more deconstruction of bad writing, see this take-down of an Esquire cover story.  

Stephen Leather and the sock puppet blues

There’s been something of a commotion in that murky space where writing and commerce meet on the web. The thriller writer Stephen Leather has admitted to creating various online identities with which to praise his own titles and disparage those of his writers and RJ Ellory has been caught out doing the same; meanwhile, John Locke bought 300 reviews to raise the profile of his self-published titles. This is nothing new of course; the novelist John Rechy was caught out as far back as 2004. Before these misdeeds are dismissed as a problem solely for the cut-throat market in genre fiction, let’s not forget that the (previously?) respected historian Orlando Figes was busted on much the same charges a couple of years ago; and as Christopher Howse points out, Walter Scott and Walt Whitman also transgressed, albeit not on Amazon. Much of the more recent nefarious activity has been exposed thanks to the sterling efforts of the author Jeremy Duns, and he’s among the signatories to a letter in the Telegraph deploring such activities and vowing never to transgress in a similar manner.

Now let’s put this in context, which is not to acquit Leather and Ellory and co of any apparent wrongdoing. There are too many books and far too many authors and not nearly enough readers. This has always been the case. In the last few years, technology has made it even easier for wannabe authors to get product into the public domain, but they usually have to do so without the professional advice and support of conventional publishers. At the same time, those who do have professionals behind them find that the level of back-up is being reduced; a publishers will attend to editing, printing and distribution but the burden of raising a work’s profile increasingly falls on the author. And someone who knows how to write a readable thriller or cook book or erotic blockbuster may also have the savvy for self-marketing and social media, but it doesn’t necessarily follow.

And this is where things start to get a bit grey. Ian Hocking has mused with his customary sagacity about the dilemmas encountered by self-published writers. I’ve always had a bit of corporate heft behind my own modest efforts, but I’ve still had to do quite a bit of donkey work. I haven’t taken to bestowing five stars upon my own books, but I have made efforts to raise my own profile on Amazon and elsewhere. If I send free copies to friends, on the understanding that they’ll write an online review at some point, is that a bad thing? When posting such reviews, should they make clear that they know me? (Some do; some don’t.) Am I entitled to get annoyed with the ones who don’t keep up their end of the bargain. Or do I just assume that they’ve posted negative reviews under a pseudonym and haven’t told me? What about the Amazon Vine system, or LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers, by which free copies are sent out to people who request them? Is that more or less needy than sending a review copy to The Guardian or the New York Times? What about the mutual back-scratching that Private Eye always identifies with its round-up of the books of the year. Is that better or worse than what RJ Ellory has done. Are there rules? Conventions? Should there be a law?

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the writers who signed the Telegraph letter, but I’d hazard a guess that Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Joanne Harris don’t feel compelled to check into Amazon every 20 minutes to check incremental shifts in their sales ranks, or whether “A reader from Norwich” has given their latest opus three or four stars. And again, I don’t condone what the likes of Stephen Leather have done. But I’ll admit to a twinge of sympathy for someone who pushes the ethical envelope a little too far in an effort to rescue his or her life’s work from oblivion.

Of course, the problem isn’t confined to authors and similar fey ponces. Review sites for restaurants and hotels become all but useless when they’re taken over by PR hacks. And despite all the  complaints about Wikipedia being a platform for know-nothings, I get far more annoyed when a page has clearly been tidied up by someone rather too close to the subject. I’ve said before that Andrew Keen got things wrong in his silly book, but as social media becomes ever more important, I start to see that the reality is the exact reverse of what he describes. Pretty soon, it’ll be just another Cult of the Professional. And they’re the ones who really should know better.

PS: Alison Flood in The Guardian covers much the same ground, but some of the comments are interesting. Not sure if the pro-Leather one is sock-puppetry or sarcastic or sincere or what.

PPS: More on the historical perspective.

Anablog

James Altucher is one of many authors who have gone from traditional publishing to self-publishing, and he encourages others to do the same. I see exactly where he’s coming from. I’ve now had seven books published under my own name, and have been an editor or contributor for about the same number. And with every one there was something about the final product that left me dissatisfied – although, unlike Altucher, I wouldn’t place all the blame for that on the publishers.

What I’m not so sure about is his notion that self-publishing is a no-brainer for experienced bloggers because they’re sitting on a vast treasure trove of material that just needs a bit of tweaking to render it into book form. I know that some people have pulled it off; blooks were all over the place a few years, what with One-Track Belle In The North About Whom White People Are Indifferent and all that. But I did get the feeling that the blogs from which these tomes derived were, for the most part, created with an eye to a publishing deal of some sort.

I didn’t begin Cultural Snow with that thought in mind. I hoped that it might draw a wider audience to my writing, and maybe get me some work as a result, and it did to an extent. But the closest I got to writing a potential book here came with the two posts about the uke-strumming existentialist Stanley Pidd, and his exploits have fallen foul of my usual problem when it comes to writing fiction, the inability to come up with a convincing middle. (The end is bloody brilliant, thanks for asking, and I may well post it here one day.) Most of the posts are written as, well, posts. You know, for a blog. Which means that many of them include explanatory links, and quite a few have video clips or the like; the sort of thing that doesn’t usually work that well on paper.

To be fair, Altucher is right that this blog contains plenty of stuff already. And all that stuff could be updated and expanded, and maybe bulked out even further with various doodlings from other sites. And hey, I could always turn some of the links into footnotes, which I bloody love. In fact, footnotes have been to some degree a sticking point between the publisher and myself in my last three books, but if I did the whole thing myself I’d be the publisher as well, so the arguments wouldn’t happen. Actually, they probably wouldn’t, but at least I’d win the argument this time. Actually, I’d probably lose.

The fact remains that I haven’t been writing a book for the past six years. I’ve been writing a blog. It’s on Blogger, which may give you a clue. And why would people suddenly want to pay money for something they could have freely accessed on line, since 2005? Altucher argues that they’ll be paying for the curation as much as for the content – but doesn’t this mean that they’d also pay to read this stuff online provided I just ditched a couple of the jokes that didn’t really work, changed the font, dealt with the overuse of  the word “actually” in the previous paragraph and tweaked the order a bit?

Ultimately I’m a tad ambivalent about the whole idea. Would you buy and/or read a book made up, for the most part, of posts from Cultural Snow? Bearing in mind that I probably wouldn’t much want to read it. Even though, according to Altucher, I’ve already written it. Let me know in the space below. See, that’s something else you can’t do with books.

The Gaddafi/Westlife memorial blog post

...and suddenly, when I really ought to be preparing light artillery to repel looters, something leaps unbidden into my head about a piece I wrote for Careless Talk Costs Lives, about going to see the LA band The Warlocks in some smelly back room in London, and how a drunk and/or mad man singing Eddie Cochran songs (or was it Hank Williams?) on the station platform on the way home seemed to act as a sort of digestif to the whole gig, and there were discursions about the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead (both of whom had been called The Warlocks at some stage or another) and Beavis and Butt-head (who weren’t, so far as I know) and the article had 17 footnotes, and when they used it in the magazine, it appeared that the designer couldn’t really cope with that sort of thing, but in any case I can’t find a copy of it anywhere, but while I’m in that frame of mind I try to find some songs by The Warlocks and they aren’t nearly as good as I remember, and I start to doubt whether the missing article was all that great in the first place.



Every time I use footnotes, it seems that there’s someone in the publishing chain who can’t cope. They cut them back, or shove them to the end of the book, or both. They really ought to read this article, by Alexandra Horwitz.

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who has expressed concern about the flooding in Bangkok. We’ve been untouched so far, but the run-off is expected to reach the canal nearest us in the next few hours. Our luck may well continue, but if in the event that it doesn’t, we have plenty of food, water, improving reading material and other necessaries, and also the advantage of a second storey if things do get damp down below. The most likely forecast is a few days of grumbling inconvenience at worst. And if the next blog post washes up on your shore in a bottle, think of it as part of the analogue revival I was talking about last week. But in the meantime, this is pretty damn fabulous:

Jiving us that we were voodoo

Sometimes people send me links to things, in the hope that I’ll mention them on the blog. Apparently they’re not terribly bothered whether I’m nice or nasty or indifferent about them, provided the product gets a mention. I will however take this opportunity to note that Anatomy of Norbiton is delightfully odd; and that High50 isn’t my sort of thing quite yet, thanks, although I did catch myself last night ranting about why people today are rubbish because they listen to Justin Bieber when they could be enjoying Marlena Shaw, so maybe I really should spend more time there. Oh, and I just got an e-mail to remind me to remind you that Rock’s Backpages will be 10 years old in November, but since that’s got some of my stuff on it, that’s hardly a disinterested plug.

A link, however, is just a link; every now and then someone sends me something analogue and meatyspacey. The estimable Howard Male, for example, who put my way a copy of his novel Etc Etc Amen. And I think the solidity, the realness of the book is what caught my attention, rather more than an e-book might have done. The author has had some copies made up through the auspices of lulu.com, but it’s fairly clear that this is just a means to an end: he wants a proper, old-school publisher to pick it up. And there are plenty of arguments to be had around that notion, and whether a book only becomes a book when a publisher says it is (and backs that up with hard cash) but we’ve been there, haven’t we?

Etc Etc Amen is a novel about rock music. Except that it isn’t of course, because plenty of people have attempted to write novels about rock music and failed: the best stab was, in my far-from-humble opinion, Nik Cohn’s I Am Still the Greatest says Johnny Angelo, but that’s another story, literally and figuratively.

The plot revolves around Zachary B, a glam rock star whose identity clearly owes much to David Bowie and Marc Bolan, but is specifically distinguished from either (Bowie lends him his Stylophone). He’s clearly clever and talented, but not as much of either as he thinks he is. Success makes him something of a petulant ponce; failure just makes him a self-pitying git. Male wisely  avoids attempting to render the actual process of music-making in fictional form, apart from a deliciously bathetic comeback gig in Trafalgar Square. He’s far more interested in those that feed off rock’s festering corpse: the journalist who gets too close; the eerily calm stalker; the fans who turn his slightest utterances into a religion. And this is where things get interesting.

The narrative, which boogies back and forth between London in the 1970s and Marrakech in something approximating the present day, is broken up by philosophical screeds expounding the KUU, the Knowing Unknowable Universe. It’s a sort of fundamentalist agnosticism, and I personally found its details eminently skippable, but then I gave up on the poetry in Pale Fire, so what do I know? That’s not really the point, though. Just as the nature of Zachary’s music is all but irrelevant, so is the content of the KUU. It’s the effect that each of them has on people that matters, the ability of rock and religion to persuade people to do bloody stupid things. It’s not necessarily an original idea (think of Bowie’s leper messiah) but Male is more convincing than most in persuading us that fandom can snowball into something bigger and worse: the climax is like the Jonestown Massacre choreographed by the Marx Brothers. And who’s to say that’s not feasible? People must have looked on the early Christians in a similar manner to the way we see those Bolan fanatics who gather at Barnes Common every September.

Male hasn’t written the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll novel, but then I don’t think anyone ever will. What he has done is to write one of the smartest, most knowing books about fandom since Nick Hornby’s early stuff. The text could possibly do with a modest trim, and there are a few typos here and there, but that’s what publishers are supposed to deal with, right? So, publishers – deal with it.

The end

These are trying and confusing times for those of us who make words do vaguely interesting things and hope to be paid for our efforts occasionally (apart from full-time Scrabble hustlers, they’re remarkably sanguine about everything). Oh noes, says Ewan Morrison in The Guardian, the book is dead, and pretty soon “writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.” Hey, chill, says Lloyd Shepherd in the same fine publication, it’s just changing, not dying, y’know, like a Time Lord. (I made that last bit up.) And John Walsh in The Independent awakens from a long lunch just so he can worry that kids today don’t read Fowler’s Modern English Usage like they used to. He then worries even more, because his publisher’s buggered off without paying the bill. (I’m afraid I made that bit up as well.)

Meanwhile, Waterstone’s stops doing its 3 for 2 offers.

I know it’s not quite what Roland Barthes meant by the Death of the Author, but it does feel as if the Death of the Author or the Writer or Writing or the Book is only being forestalled by an infinite number of writers writing about whether they are or aren’t dead yet.

Silly point

Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland (2008) tells the story of a New York-based Dutchman whose marriage unravels in the aftermath of 9/11, and who attempts to pull himself together by joining a cricket club in Staten Island. Barack Obama  apparently thought it was very good, and so do I. It would be more than a little trite to describe Netherland as a novel about cricket; but at the same time, without cricket there wouldn’t really be much of a novel. So I was a bit surprised when I saw a US paperback edition of Netherland in a Bangkok bookshop the other day, and noticed that there was no reference to cricket anywhere on the cover. Not even an opportunistic World Cup tie-in...

OK, so most Americans don’t get cricket, despite the fact that the first ever international match was played on US soil, so it was probably a hard-headed decision on the part of the publishers, who reckoned that nobody would buy a book that involved a sport they barely know exists. But would a British publisher bring out an edition of The Natural by Bernard Malamud with no indication that it might contain stuff about baseball? Or Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries with the title erased...

(The image is of the mighty Bart King, the greatest American cricketer of all time, who in his last tour of England, in 1911, took 87 wickets at an average of 11.01. Which, for the benefit of my lovely American readers, is rather good.)

The customer is always irrelevant

Among the many writers (of varying degrees of up-their-own-arse-ness) discussing their craft in The Guardian a few days back, it’s the late, glorious Beryl Bainbridge who says the most by analysing the least:

I don’t write for readers; I don’t think many writers do – I don’t think any. They say they do, don't they? But... well, I only write for myself, and when somebody says: “Oh, your book has given me so much pleasure,” I just think, “How peculiar”. I don't know what to say. Of course I don't say that; I smile and say “How nice” – but I think I’d have written books whether they were published or not. I just liked writing.

So presumably the whole concept of vanity publishing left her entirely befuddled.

Society of the spectacles

When Jonathan Franzen’s publishers announced that thousands of copies of his novel Freedom would be pulped after the wrong version was printed, the dials on my cultural bullshit detector immediately flipped into the red. It’s just the sort of story that liberates an author from the high walls of the review sections, and into the news pages, where normal people might go. It’s an amusing cock-up story, but not one that reflects badly on the writer himself; a bit like that time when Jeanette Winterson’s manuscript was left at Balham Tube station.

But the next événement to spice up the drudgery of Franzen’s UK promotional tour was at the same time too banal and too weird to have been dreamed up by some fresh-faced catamite in the Fourth Estate PR department. At Monday’s launch party, someone swiped the poor man’s glasses from his nose, dropping off a ransom note at the same time. The location of the attack (the Serpentine Gallery) and the preposterous demand (£100,000 to you, guv) immediately suggest some sort of neo-Situationist prank, probably carried out by art students.

But no. The spec-snatcher, James Fletcher, is indeed a student, but a student of computational aerospace design. Any aesthetic motivation appears to have been subconscious, as he wrote afterwards in an article for GQ:

Some articles have suggested that the theft was perhaps a display of some kind of art... I’d just like to comment that if art is defined as something which provokes an emotional response, then I suppose it was art.

Instead, the attack seems to have been motivated by far more mundane factors:

We sat drinking excessive champagne for a while and talking to some of the guests there until I realised just how dull it all was... I’d mentioned several times to my accomplice how much I admired Franzen’s frames... I remember shouting as I snatched the glasses off the bewildered man's face that I was with Channel 4 doing a comedy stunt. Looking back, I’m not exactly sure what that meant or why I said it.

All in all, then, a terribly 2010 manifestation of artistic outrage: a combination of drunkenness, boredom, material avarice and the incoherent, atavistic desire for some kind of fleeting celebrity, however ill-defined. It’s the sort of thing someone should write a big fat novel about. What’s Jonathan Franzen doing these days?

Dead links to dead trees

Some bits and pieces, connected only by their location on the cusp of cyber and meat:

• The Times wins the right to unmask police blogger Nightjack, a move that seems to serve no purpose than allowing old media to remind the blogosphere who’s boss. The whole thing makes me exceedingly angry; fortunately, Chicken Yogurt is clear-headed enough to point out the essential hypocrisy of The Times’s position.

• On similar lines, tight-collared reactionary Simon Heffer in the Telegraph spews extraordinary quantities of nonsense about the rubbishness of Facebook, never once questioning the privilege that accords him a platform.

• Graphic design student Rob Matthews prints off 437 articles from Wikipedia and turns them into a book. “It makes people laugh,” says Matthews, “which is good.”

• Ann Kirschner tackles the format question that’s got publishing in knots, by consuming Dickens as book, audiobook, Kindle and iPhone.

• Everett True offers a quantitative comparison between blogs now and fanzines then.

• The whole Iranian hoo-ha raises a number of questions about politics and technology, not least the question of whether we perceive the result to be unjust because Twitter users are more likely to be Moussavi supporters. However, Harvard academic Jonathan Zittrain makes a wider point about this most misunderstood medium, and why it is so successful at times of civic upheaval: “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

PS: More on the Nightjack case from Paperhouse, Anton Vowl and Girl With A One-Track Mind, who suffered similar indignities at the hands of Rupert’s catamites, and also ties the whole grubby affair up with what's occurring in Tehran.

PPS: And the bloggers, inevitably, strike back.

Before my time

Clive James in The Guardian, on the late literary agent Pat Kavanagh:

Every literary career is different but the same principles apply. The first principle is to have principles. The writer should not expect to have junk published; the publisher should not expect to get away with publishing junk; and the agent should not expect to be praised for extracting a huge advance from the publisher for a piece of junk that will never get the advance back.

Ouch. You know what, Clive, you can't get Spangles any more, either.

Whatever Zola wants

From The Naked Civil Servant, by Quentin Crisp:

Now that the marketing of all goods, including books, has become a shameless hoax practised on innocent consumers, the works of M Zola are packaged to look as if they were by Mr Spillane. This ruse works because no one would dare to take a book back to a shop because it wasn't as filthy as the cover promised.

That was 40 years ago. Of course, now we can get any permutation of perversity we desire just by switching off SafeSearch, nobody looks to the literary classics for smut, at least not directly. They get the smut from the TV adaptations, or at least from Andrew Davies's heavy pre-transmission hints about the amount of filth he's packed in this time, although they never turn out to be as naughty as he suggests. Meanwhile, publishers have to sell Austen and Dickens and Gaskell on the basis of them being on the telly, with that one you like in it, you know, that one with the nice hair.

But Crisp's essential point still holds, I suppose. Nobody's ever taken a book back because it didn't have a damp Colin Firth in it.