Project Update, because I have nothing Else to say.

I have submitted a bunch of my short stories to a few local literary journals, but that isn't all that interesting.

On Youtube, I've uploaded myself reading some poems. It was a pretty disastrous attempt. The first poem I attempted was Andrew Marvell's The Garden. It was far over my head, with dated rhymes I couldn't pull of saying correctly. So instead I just read them with the current pronunciation, which seems off.

I had better luck with the second poem I attempted. Edgar Allen Poe's Alone is a cute little poem which explores the feeling of isolation and those dark feelings we sometimes feel. However, even here I had two difficulties. I lack decent technical skills, so the video is amateurish with sound quality is bad. My annunciation is also weak, and I struggled with the getting the words to sound right. Still, it was better than my attempt at Andrew Marvell.

I'm not sure why, But I've uploaded some abandoned drafts and my notebook to the internet.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0CmjnJdFuvVR1IyZ1NDbUhwUjg/view?usp=sharing

The year is dead, long live the year

Happy New Year. For 2016, there are some projects your commentator is planning

> Trying to get more short stories published 

> A superhero novel - superheroes are popular. I feel like I should embrace what is coming at me. There have been a couple of decent superhero novels recently despite it being the domain of comics. Mainly I want to write my equivalent of Grimus or Cup of Gold. Get something out there for the sake of getting something out there.

> Upload some fragments from my notebooks and some abandoned projects. 

> Planning to upload by end of the month some videos of me reading Poe's Alone and Marvell's The Garden.

Is it worth reading The Internet Not The Answer?

Book reviewed -  Keen, Andrew The Internet is not the Answer, (Atlantic books, London: 2015)

All quotes taken from The Internet is not the Answer unless otherwise stated.

I am discussing whether Andrew Keen’s The Internet is not The Answer is worth reading. The evangelists of the internet promised it would solve all our problems. Keen’s book argues the opposite drawing on the last quarter-century of the internet and all the negative consequences, from high unemployment to the loss of privacy. I’m saying that, yeah, this book is worth reading, although if you know the history of the internet it is worth skipping the first two Chapters which are pretty much standard timelines, (just slightly more cynical than normal). The first chapter is the history of the internet from Vannevar Bush until the Web 1.0 of the nineties. Chapter 2 continues with the history of the monetized, user-based Web 2.0; from the launch of  Google. Keen keeps stressing the good intentions these people had and how with each development the egalitarian dream dissolves a bit more.

Keen’s book slightly misnamed, although the catchphrase, “No, The Internet is not the answer” appears several times through the book, especially when concluding a thought. He is aware we can’t go back to his golden age of music and publishing. In the book Keen states, with a clever phrase, that he is “Nostalgic for a time when we were optimistic about the future. This is the reality for the time being.” (p.119)

Part of his problem is with the boy plutocrats and the rise of libertarian ethics which have emerged since the beginning of the World Wide Web. The story he wants to tell about the internet is the “important” one, not about the 1%, but “…the 99% who haven’t invested in Uber, don’t own Bitcoins, and aren’t renting out spare rooms in their castle on Airbnb.” (p. 74) He fails to go into detail about the sincerity of the libertarians, who are employing the rhetoric that favors them, but possibly caring only about their own egos, will abandon libertarianism when it suits them. Kim Dotcom (a man who Keen rightly dislikes) is a classic example of this, but Keen brushes over Dotcom criticizing the man's ego before fluttering to the next point. 

Keen has been called the Christopher Hitchens of Silicon Valley, in respect to his iconoclasm. There appears to be more similarities between Keen and Hitchens. Both authors write a good, interesting sentence but use this style often to show how much they know instead of what is relevant. Keen is a clear writer. He uses a colloquial, plain writing style, regularly starting sentences with No or Yes before dropping into the point he was making. Quite often he is answering questions asked two or three pages back. 

Keen especially seems easily distracted about his topic, like he is pointing at concepts from a tour bus where the passages are forced to look at the move onto the next sight only just having noticed the one they are own now. Jargon terms are introduced in quote marks everywhere, used once, and never appear again in the book.

l  “…replaced by a “giveaway” economy” (p. 127)

l  ““Eyeballs” as everyone describes audience.” (p. 127)

l  “…warned about this “native advertising” strategy.” (p.135)

While the book spends a lot of time hovering over the ruins of the Soho music industry and Rochester, New York, (the HQ of Kodak) Keen could have spent going into more detail about any of the topics he spent only half a page on.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that the book sets out to be an overview of all the problems, but still seems narrow in scope. The book is mostly focused on the US. The Arab Spring is given only half a paragraph, and that is to point out that the great revolutions co-ordinated on social media have failed. Nothing is mentioned of how the counter-revolutions also employed social media. What is completely missing is the situation in China where the government is gradually managing to restrict every undesirable (from their perspective) possibility of the Internet. They have the big names of Silicon Valley kowtowing, while knock-offs thrive.

So go ahead and read The Internet is not the answer.  I will leave you with one thought from Andrew Keen…

“Rather than establishing trust a 2014 Reason-Rupe poll of Americans found Facebook was trusted with our personal data by only 5% of the respondents, significantly less than either the 35% of the people who trusted the Internal Revenue Service or even the 18% who trusted the National Security Agency.” (p. 68)

What did the maker of the world’s most expensive salt shaker do with pigeon blood?

So, the world’s most expensive salt shaker is usually said to be the Cellini Salt Cellar which is currently worth $60 million. It was made by the Italian goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini in the sixteenth century for Francis I of France. Finished by 1543, the cellar is decorated by a gold enameled sculpture of two figures. The cellar is currently on display in Vienna. But you can read all this on Wikipedia. Apart from being a goldsmith, Cellini wrote a great set of memoirs. This is his description of the Cellar:

"I first laid down an oval framework, considerably longer than half a cubit… upon this ground, wishing to suggest the interminglement of land and ocean, I modelled two figures, considerably taller than a palm in height, which were seated with their legs interlaced, suggesting those lengthier branches of the sea which run up into the continents. The sea was a man, and in his hand I placed a ship, elaborately wrought in all its details, and well adapted to hold a quantity of salt. Beneath him I grouped the four sea-horses, and in his right hand he held his trident. The earth I fashioned like a woman, with all the beauty of form, the grace, and charm of which my art was capable. She had a richly decorated temple firmly based upon the ground at one side; and here her hand rested. This I intended to receive the pepper. In her other hand I put a cornucopia, overflowing with all the natural treasures I could think of. Below this goddess, in the part which represented earth, I collected the fairest animals that haunt our globe. In the quarter presided over by the deity of ocean, I fashioned such choice kinds of fishes and shells as could be properly displayed in that small space."

Well, it is a detailed description, apart from the considerably rough measurements, It seems that the Italians predicted the adjective ‘choice.’ What does this have to do with Pigeon blood then? Well, in another passage of the same autobiography, Cellini, working on different projects describes an accident.

“It so happened on one of those mornings… …that a very fine splinter of steel flew into my right eye, and embedded itself so deeply in the pupil that it could not be extracted. I thought for certain I must lose the sight of that eye. After some days I sent for Maestro Raffaello dé Pilli, the surgeon, who obtained a couple of live pigeons, and placing me upon my back across a table, took the birds and opened a large vein they have beneath the wing, so that the blood gushed out into my eye. I felt immediately relieved, and in the space of two days the splinter came away, and I remained with eyesight greatly improved.”

A coincidental recover. But there is the answer to the question. The designer of the world’s most expensive salt shaker used pigeon’s blood to remove a steel splinter from his eye.

Links

Famed 'La Saliera' sculpture back on display in Vienna – 2013 Article
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/28/uk-art-austria-saliera-idUSLNE91R02420130228


Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini on Project Guttenberg -
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4028/pg4028.html

Unsourced

There is the old, hippie-era joke I wrote down in my notebook and I can’t remember where I found it. It goes - “She came into our room the other night yelling about peace and love,” said the Wife. “Too many groups are coming in with this militant talk,” added the husband. 

Notes I scribbled as I made dinner

I've just read Raymond Carver's short story Where I'm Calling From. It is the first thing by Carver I've read, and I quite enjoyed it. I have seen somewhere that Haruki Murakami is a huge Carver fan and I noticed some similarities between them. Their sentences are the same, the tools of a sharp realism which is short and to the point. Also similar is the is the location of a isolated retreat; in Where I'm calling From, it is a clinic for alcoholics. Retreats are common in H.M's work,

O For A Muse Of Fire

So, I had an idea that if I had writers block I could just go on Wikipedia and cannibalize an event from history and select a random page, regurgitating what I got back in this post.  

Reading the front page of Wikipedia today. It is 139 year since the Provinces of colonial New Zealand were finally abolished after most of them had gone bankrupt. Apart from most of the regional holidays in New Zealand, they have a very little legacy.

It is All Saint's Day, but nothing interesting to write about there. It is International World Vegan day, a celebration held by The Vegan Society. I was surprised to learn that the Vegan Society was founded  way back in November 1944, although they were 97 years behind their Cheese-eating cousins of the Vegetarian Society, which was founded in the UK in 1847.

Exhausting anniversaries, I selected a random Wikipedia page to find something to write about. I got an article on Georgia Chapman, which is so short I may as well just copy an paste it.

Georgia Chapman (born 12 February 1987^[1]) is an Australian association footballer who last played for the Brisbane Roar in the Australian W-League. She is also a teacher and is the twin sister of Amy Chapman.
 - From Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia   

I think if I want to produce interesting content, I can't just phone it in. I will have to do some real work.
Bugger.