Art and Technology

I'm just in the middle of reading a biography of Stravinsky, and thinking how difficult it was for such an artist to hear his work performed. He composed by writing on paper, usually sitting at the piano; then had to transcribe what he wrote (using an amanuensis) for realisation by an orchestra. This needed to be assembled and paid for, which usually required a huge dontation from some patroness or another - and then further expense was incurred if the work was performed in public.

Today a composer needs only a simple laptop and a bit of software - both virtually free of charge. The results of composition can be reproduced at every step of the way - at zero cost. Of course not many major artists have gone down this route. But the process has begun.

For instance, film directors Mike Figgis and David Lynch work with digital cameras which cost no more than a few hundred pounds, And the Internet is now packed tight with musicians offering samples of their music via sites such as MySpace. Some have bypassed conventional production and distribution routes altogether. They've gone straight from back bedroom recording and mixing to podcasting and their own sites.

Most writers continue to use the very low-tech materials of pen or pencil on paper. Some have migrated to the word processor - and others might even, unbeknown to me anyway, be experimenting with voice recognition dictating software.

Either way, the results can easily be assembled in digital form for editing and processing. Moreover, unknown writers can make their work available to unlimited numbers of online readers via blogs and web sites. They can also advertise their hard copy products if and when they make it into print - or meanwhile use print-on-demand.

I know very few who have found fame in this way (apart from the Belle de Jour case, which I continue to regard as dubious) but many creative writing sites exist, and the medium is brand new. Something may emerge before too long.

Front Line Services

At the risk of sounding like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, I am astonished at the number of people - from radio and TV announcers, to politicians and people who should know better - who continue to use the expression front line in describing their relationship with the public. Government ministers responsible for children, schools, or social services routinely describe their 'front line services' or people offering 'support' on the 'front line'. The use of this metaphor is doubly telling. They might be accused of ignorance: they are clutching at a journalistic cliche to dramatize their bureaucratic efforts. But even if this is the (only slightly) excusable reason, it does not hide the fact that at a sub-conscious level, it's a dead giveaway that they regard the people who they are supposed to be serving, helping, supporting - as The Enemy.

It's a military metaphor, for goodness' sake! The front line is where one lot of armed men confront another with a view to killing each other. Is this how how our government minister for schools sees the children who are being educated? It would seem so.

What makes this even worse is these ministers, police officers, petty local officials, and government spokespeople are supposed to be SERVANTS of the public. WE are paying THEIR wages, and they are supposed to be acting on OUR behalf.

Michael Jackson - A Fallen Star?

The tragedy of Michael Jackson seems to me relatively straightforward.

He was a young black man trying to become a white middle-aged woman.

He was reluctant to come out as a gay paedophilie.

The drugs overdose you can take for granted.

But I don't know how anyone will genetically explain a black man who has three (so-called) children - all of whom are white.

Content Management Systems - for beginners

Ten years ago I sat down and started to learn HTML code with a view to creating my own web site. Actually, that is a process which continues to this day, because it's a technology which cannot be mastered in an instant - as anyone with half a brain will agree. It wasn't as easy as some guidance books make out, but I persisted; and 1,500 pages later, I have something of which I am not ashamed at www.mantex.co.uk. But as it grew in size, I realised that I needed to move from hand-crafted pages and navigation to a content management system (CMS).

These are stand-alone, modularised programs which can be used to create, edit, review, index, search, publish and archive a large scale collection of materials. They are reputed to take much of the slog out of dealing with complex web sites - and I was eager to avoid having to change a single detail of my site 1,500 times on each occasion of coming up with a bright new idea.

But where to start? My son gave me the first piece of good advice. "Whatever you do, avoid in-house, custom-made systems". This turned out to be correct. I even put out tenders to some web-designers, and almost all of them came back with solutions which would mean being locked into their systems - which hardly anyone else would be using, and which might go out of business in six month's time. The answer was obvious - use Open Source systems. I located Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

For the next few weeks I dabbled with all three, and was led into a labyrinth of puzzlement and time-consuming frustration - all because I had not grasped some fundamental concepts about CMS. In the end I settled on WordPress because it seemed easier to use - but the fundamental concepts (and problems) are similar with each program. Some of these might seem elementary to expert users, but as a rule of thumb I always think that if I am struggling with something, there will be plenty of other people in the same boat. Hence these notes.

The number one conceptual issue (and I've not seen it mentioned in any guidance manuals) is that what you see on screen whilst inputting data has nothing to do with what the finished results will look like. That's for two reasons.

The first is that the interface for entering the data is just a tool, - it's not part of the end product. But the far more important reason is that when using CMS the content of your site is separated entirely from its appearance on screen. Why is that the case?

Because in CMS all items - text, graphics, links, titles, sub-titles, adverts, and stock items - are entered separately and kept in different places from each other so that they can be recombined in a number of different ways at a later date. This avoids having to re-submit data each time a new page is created.

For instance, the content of footer to a page is usually fixed. It might contain the name and address of the organisation; the contact details; a copyright notice; terms and conditions; a datestamp; and web links. All of this information goes into one file, and that file is added to the bottom of every page. If anything changes, you edit the file once and the change appears on every page throughout the site.

How does this work? Well - all the separate items of information - the text, the graphics, the footers, and the adverts - are entered into a database (probably MySQL). The database keeps all these separate items in their own ''containers' until they are summoned to appear. Text goes into one container; graphics will go into something like a photo album; and so on. So far so good, but how do they get from the database onto the screen?

Enter two more layers of software. A program called PHP decides what to drag up into the screen. It is software which is programmed to decide which elements of a page to assemble. First grab the header, add the body text, throw in any graphics, then finish off with the footer. Templates decide where and how that information is displayed, and the appearance of the information on screen is determined by style sheets (CSS).

This probably sounds complex, but you can see the logic which lies under the process. Put any number of elements into a big database, then summon up those you require. It's a combination of these separate elements: the database in which the elements are stored; the program which summons the elements; a template which determines how the elements are arranged; and a style sheet which determines their appearance on screen. Makes it sound quite simple, doesn't it? No - I thought not.

Content Management Systems have huge advantages, and they also have problems. For instance, one enormously powerful in-built feature is that you can designate which parts of a site a particular page belongs to, and the CMS software will automatically work out the navigational system for getting there. For instance, a page on Virginia Woolf can be categorised as belonging to a sub-category twentieth-century literature in a main category Literary Studies - but it can also be attached to pages listed in categories 'Bloomsbury', 'Modernism', and 'Literary Criticism'. That's the upside. The downside is that you still need to know quite a bit about information architecture to know how to control all this.

And there's another thing. You'll endlessly be asking yourself - &qot;I've just created a new page. Where is it now? And how can I find it?" It's not easy to keep a mental picture of all your assets (as they're called) when everything is disappearing into that big database.

That's more or less where I'm up to right now - and I know there's still a long way to go. But if like me you're still a beginner, I just thought these few words might help.

New Media - New Methods

I'm not a great sports enthusiast, and the one sport in which I once participated (cycle racing) is regarded somewhere between a Cinderella sport and non-existent by the UK media. But thanks to the Internet I am no longer dependent on the middlebrow, patronizing offerings of the BBC or of ITV when it can be bothered.

All last week I watched the Dauphinee Liberee, and this week it's the Tour of Switzerland - courtesy of my favourite biking site steephill.tv. And I watched on a variety of devices - my desktop PC, a netbook, and even my trusty little iPod.

If you're at all interested in cycle racing, or even if you want to see what a specialist web site can do - have a look. The page layout and style are very clunky. The site has almost a legacy feel about it. But for content, links, and up-to-dateness it can't be beat.

They have reports in text and pictures within hours of a race finishing. The general classifications are updated daily. Previews of the days to come are on offer as a matter of course - with maps, contour profiles, team lists, and commentary.

Every day there are multiple selections of video clips of stage overviews, dramatic sequences, and last 5 kilometer highlights in several languages. Links to YouTube allow you to replay fantastic highlights from stages you might have missed, and track sequences you couldn't possibly see elsewhere - unless you had your own private helicopter. And of course - it's all free.

We really are living through a period of amazing transformation in the availability of news, information, and entertainment. It's no wonder that newspapers are losing lots of money, and people are refusing to pay the BBC a licence fee. We don't need them. Other people are doing it better. More efficiently. And delivering what the customer really wants.

Maupassant's Short Stories

Guy de Maupassant was a prolific and very famous writer in his own lifetime. Between 1880 and 1891 for instance he wrote about 300 short stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books. He wrote in the heyday of the short story, and it is this literary form for which he is now best remembered. Maupassant was one of the late nineteenth-century writers shaping what was to become the modern short story. His contribution to the genre was to pare down the means of expression and to focus on the effect of the tale. His stories are not abbreviated novels or rambling prose poems. They tell a story - and often it has a sting in the tail. Like other French writers of the late nineteenth century he was keen to explore ordinary everyday life - often exposing its less appetising and even grim features.

I bought this particular collection after watching Jean Renoir's beautiful film Partie de campagne which is a completely faithful account of the title story. But I was amazed to discover that the full length feature film and masterpiece of the cinema was based on a tale no more than a few pages long.

His style, much influenced by his friend Flaubert, is one of scrupulous clarity. Everything is pared to a minimum, and the material world is rendered in well-chosen detail. His attitude is that of a sceptical realist, with an eye for the tragic and sad elements of life which lead many critics to brand him a pessimist. They may have a point, because it's remarkable just how many of his stories end with someone's abrupt death.

He was shortening and concentrating the narrative, stripping it of excrescence. Yet he still drags along some of its traditional features - the whiplash ending for instance. Some of them are not much more than well-articulated anecdotes, but they are usually resolved with an ironic or dramatic twist.

Despite these weaknesses, it's his contribution to the development of the short story for which he is still respected. It is his stories which are still widely read, not his full-length novels.

[Maupassant] fixes a hard eye on some spot of human life, usually some dreary, ugly, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible ... Monsieur de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical.

It's amazing to think that Henry James, a friend and admirer who wrote those words was writing at the same time - though when considering the compositional crudities in some of these stories, their origin in newspapers and popular magazines should be taken into account.

But this famous terseness of style is not quite so ubiquitous as is often claimed. He is quite prepared to indulge in rhetorical flourishes to make his point - as in this account of a Parisian visiting the provinces:

I wondered: 'What on earth can I do after dinner?' I thought how long an evening could be here in this town in the provinces: the slow, grim stroll through unfamiliar streets, the depressing gloom which the solitary traveller feels oozing out of passers by who are complete strangers in every respect, from the provincial cut of their jackets, hats, and trousers to their ways and the local accent, an all-pervading misery which drips from the houses, the shops, the outlandish shapes of the vehicles in the streets, and the generally unaccustomed hubbub, an uneasy sinking of the spirits which prompts you to walk a little quicker as though you were lost in a dangerous, cheerless country and makes you want to go back to your hotel, that loathsome hotel, where your room has been pickled in innumerable dubious smells, where you are not entirely sure about the bed, and where there's a hair stuck fast in the dried dust at the bottom of the washbasin.

In one of the finest tales in this collection he tackles a subject which has a long and honourable history amongst writers - the story of a man who, as a result of some trivial argument or misplaced notion of pride, suddenly finds that he is about to fight a duel. It also includes his best known - 'The Necklace' - another tale which has spawned many variations, as well as 'Le Horla', a story which strangely parallels Maupassant's own descent into premature madness and death, brought on by syphilis.

Later writers such as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and especially Virginia Woolf were to take his stylistic developments further - and bring the short story into closer contact with the prose poem and the philosophic meditation. But connoisseurs of this literary form will always be well rewarded by re-visiting one of the earlier masters of the genre.

---

Guy de Maupassant, A Day in the Country and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.312, ISBN 0192838636

 

 

more LITERARY STUDIES books

Short Stories and Mashups

It's another reading week. Well, five days actually, because I've got a business meeting back in the UK next Tuesday. It'll be hard to leave this beautiful weather. I've been reading Maupassant and Chekhov in preparation for a few further thoughts on the short story - interspersed by a fairly tough techno-business study of mashups in the 'business enterprise' (if that isn't a tautology).

I check my emails in the morning, go for coffee chez José, then type up yesterday's writing. After lunch it's into the garden, by the pool, hoping not to be disturbed by too many topless Swedish girls breaking the rules of the Puebla. I would remonstrate with them severely, but my Swedish is a bit limited. More keyboard work when the sun drops, and all the time able to stay in touch with the important things of life via digital culture.

Tonight I heard Mel Tormés wonderful account of Donald Fagen's The Goodbye Look which I'd never heard before. Within a couple of minute's I had tracked down the lyrics, a YouTube video of the same performance, and got six hundred plus tracks from Mel lined up on Spotify.com - which is fast replacing Last.fm as my Internet music source of choice. Good wine; quality food; unlimited sunshine. How long can this last? But I was born in a paper bag at the bottom of a cesspit.

Internet TV

Round about this time of year I start following the big cycling races such as the Giro d'Italia, the Tour de France, and the Vuelta de Espagne. Of course, it's no good relying on UK broadcast media for coverage of these events, because cycling doesn't even exist so far as they are concerned. But in 'continental' Europe (as in so much else) things are ordered different there. They have live helicopter reports from the Alps and the Dolomites twelve hours a day, full coverage, plus results and analysis on tap.

My Bakelite TV doesn't receive European stations. But no matter, because with the wonders of the Interweb, I can access sites such as the excellent steephill.tv which I have been using to watch the Giro for the last two weeks. It's an amazing site - clunky, old-fashioned in look and feel - but PACKED with links, archive footage, live feeds, video clips, and photos. Plus, smack up to date at all times. I wonder how they do it.

So I am watching events the same day, with a time delay which suits me, and I can watch again if I wish. I can compare with other events of the same kind, get links into commentary and analysis from other fans, and even clips from sites from the riders and their teams.

So - the media implications of all this are that the subsidised national television service does not deliver what I want, whereas lots of other smaller, independent providers are doing so. You can see why people increasingly resent shelling out nearly two hundred pounds a year to keep overpaid BBC executives in brandy and cigars. More importantly, you can also see how the digitization of media has a liberating and democratising effect - which is why some forms such as printed newspapers are already going out of business unless they are heavily subsidised.

Open Source Politics

Douglas Carswell is the English Tory MP whose private member's enterprise yesterday helped to get rid of the Speaker of the House of Commons - a man who has had his snout, hands, and feet in the trough of the MP's expenses scandal, and who even more importantly has tried everything he could do to prevent the scandal being investigated. So - good riddance to a corrupt (and completely incompetent) functionary, and well done to a parliamentary newcomer for helping to bring about the first resignation of a Speaker for 300 years. But when he was interviewed on Newsnight, Carswell came out with a phrase in defense of his action which seemed to me like a bolt of lightning opening the way to the future - 'Open Source Politics'.

I have written about the benefits of Open Sources here, here, here, and here. It's an approach to technology which is powered by an ultra-democratic sharing of information, making software and data available free for people to use as they wish. And it has resulted in a revolutionary transformation of the way things are done - both in business and information technology. But I have never heard it used in conjunction with politics before.

He introduced the notion of 'open primaries' whereby local people select their own members of parliament - not having them parachuted in by the party apparatus, as is still the case in the rotten old-fashioned system we have now. This was supplemented by the equally attractive idea of recalling and de-selecting MPs who failed to serve the interests of their constituents. It's a bottom-up approach which clearly has enormous potential - even though it's likely to frighten the establishment, because it's so radical - which is perhaps why it appealed to me. When I checked, there's an entry on Wikipedia explaining more. I imagine copies of his book The Plan will start flying off the shelves pretty soon now.

Are Newspapers like Banks?

Why do newspaper columnists such as Jackie Ashley and Polly Toynbee write political opinion pieces, and then fail to respond to the arguments put forward by readers in their blog comments? Do they feel it's beneath their dignity to respond? Do they not take the criticisms and points of rebuttal seriously? Can't they be bothered? Do they think they've not been paid enough to spend some extra time debating the points that are raised?

It strikes me as another example of how the mainstream media still just doesn't get it regarding the digital age. They're stuck in the old formula whereby a journalist would write an opinion piece (and that's all it is - an opinion) which was printed in the paper - and then a letters editor might select one or two responses for publication in the next-but-one day's edition - and that's it.

Wise up you people. Your opinions are worth little more than the well-informed people who track public events, have memories, and principles, and can spot a duff argument when they see one. In fact you don't seem to me very much more informed than the readership you are writing for - so why should you be getting paid at all?

Perhaps Alan Rushbridger should be answering that question. But then rather like the present government (and the banks), he is earning such a big salary whilst making such a huge loss for his employers, maybe he is not interested.

UPDATE 21 May 2009

Daily Mail & General Trust fell into the red as it reported a pre-tax loss of £239m for the six months to 29 March, with an 85% fall in operating profit at its regional arm and a 59% fall across its national newspaper division.